


Magikfanfic SpiritAssassin Drabbles

by magikfanfic



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Backstory, Canon Compliant, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Post-Rogue One, Pre-Rogue One, Slightly NSFW in some chapters, blood mention, chapter fic for the drabbles I post on Tumblr, death mention, implied child abuse and neglect in some chapters, major character death chapter 8, probably not canon compliant, will update tags as needed
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-16
Updated: 2018-03-11
Packaged: 2018-10-19 20:24:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 24
Words: 34,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10647408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magikfanfic/pseuds/magikfanfic
Summary: This is what the tags indicate it is: just a place for me to put the SpiritAssassin drabbles I post to Tumblr so anyone here who is not following me there can access them.





	1. Mise En Place

Baze is cooking, and Chirrut can smell the spices and the hot oil in the air. He knows without even having to make a cursory trip around their small kitchen that Baze has already laid everything out, perfectly measured and sorted the ingredients into that assortment of glass bowls they bought. Mise en place, Baze had said as he touched them in the store, the glass making soft ringing sounds as they clicked against each other, which helped Chirrut imagine them, small to large and not as perfect as the tone in Baze’s voice. Everything in its place. It was such a perfectly Baze thing to want, such a perfectly Baze thing to think, that Chirrut hadn’t even been able to come up with a word of protest, though in retrospect he has many.

It seems a waste to separate everything out the way that Baze does. Certainly flour, salt, cumin, and coriander do not need to occupy different containers. If they all get added at basically the same time he should simply put them in one bowl and save himself the trouble of having to wash four. Not to mention that when Baze is not in the middle of one of his cooking fiascoes the stacking bowls can make it difficult when Chirrut just needs one and has to feel through them all to determine which is the proper size for his needs. Half the time, he just gives up and changes his meal plans because it’s not worth it to sort through them all. Sometimes he just uses a ridiculously large one if that’s handy or a series of ludicrously tiny ones that he doesn’t even understand the purpose of because what can they hold? He has proven, at least to himself, that the smallest one holds two grapes, two small grapes, and nothing more. 

He is assaulted with a massive collection of them at every turn. It seems like Baze cannot stop buying bowls, and they somehow manage to cluster in every cabinet and occasionally the closet, which is ridiculous and terrible because sometimes Chirrut just wants his coat, not an endless supply of plastic bowls that Baze tells him are lovely for larger things but that he also never seems to need. Chirrut wonders whether Baze would even notice if he gave some of them away to Bodhi or Jyn or Cassian. There are so many. How could he miss a single one? Why does he need them all? They are so frustrating, strewn everywhere.

That’s what he thinks until he listens to Baze whistling softly as he moves about the kitchen, hears the bright joy in the way he hums as his fingers go from one bowl to the next. Baze, it seems, never cares about how many dishes he has to wash when he’s done or where all the bowls are going to live because he’s just happy knowing he can separate each ingredient into its own tiny bowl for the two minutes it takes before he uses it in whatever dish he’s making.

Mise en place, Chirrut thinks, as he listens to him, as he lifts his head and catches the whiff of ginger in the air, is just so perfectly Baze that he has to love it in the same breath that it infuriates him. Much like the man himself can be sometimes, so solid, so set in his ways, but also patient, infinitely so if he is going to spend time putting ingredients into fifteen or more small glass bowls only to toss everything together again in the end, watch all that work go to waste. To someone else it could seem fruitless, an example of how hard work can be for naught, but to Baze it is calming, and Chirrut will never deny him comfort if he can help it. Even if it means that bowls fall like rain when he reaches for his coat.


	2. Hello

It is cold on the landings of the stairs that run along the outside of the temple. The sun has set and the wind on Jedha always blows more violently at night. “It’s the sand saying hello!” Chirrut had told him once when they were boys, yelling in glee, arms stretched out as though he could encircle the entire world in his embrace. And Baze had been a step away, back against the wall of the temple, cautious, and watched, trying not to smile, which was impossible because it was Chirrut. It was Chirrut, and he was happy so the world was complete; there was nothing else that Baze needed.

Now, though, now the years have passed, and there are so many things that are needed. Too many things. He takes stock of it when the other masters are not watching him, he counts the stores, he does the math, which has not always been his strong suite, but he does it, slowly and laboriously, triple checking. There are not enough stores, and he does not think there are enough credits.

The advance of the Empire means that more children are sent to the temple either because their families cannot provide or just that there are no families anymore. The mouths that need to be fed increase, and the amount of credits coming in decrease. There is the kyber, and they do sell some of it, but Baze worries about that because the Empire has been sending a lot of people to the temple to assess the kyber, has started insisting that they have to approve all sales and they cannot be over a certain limit, and he just. He does not know how much longer they have, how much longer they can live the way they do.

He is starting to become tired of the platitudes that fall from the mouths of the other guardians. “The Force will provide, Baze.” “All is as the Force wills it, Guardian Malbus.” “The Force is with us.”

It used to feel so close when he was a boy. He used to think he could reach his hand out into the air and run his fingers across it like a friend’s arm, that they could laugh and smile together, that it would well and truly be alright because it was there, just out of reach, waiting, helping. Baze is not so sure now. It seems further off, in the distance, watching, and it does not reach back when he holds his hands out, fingers shaking. “Please,” he says, and it says nothing. “I don’t know how much longer we can maintain on just your will,” he says, and it says nothing. “I am frightened of what is happening,” he says, and it says nothing.

It says nothing, and Baze Malbus begins to say less as well.

Chirrut always knows how to find him no matter where he has hidden himself away so it is no surprise to hear the tap of his staff as he makes his way up the stairs, muttering to himself, probably chanting.

Ah, yes. “Why did you take his eyes?” Baze had asked the Force, and it, of course, had said nothing. It has yet to answer that one either. And Baze thinks he could live with the others things unanswered, even though they are more pressing, if the Force would just give him one reason why it needed to be this way. He hasn’t decided how long he will give it because Baze is not in the habit of being impatient, but there will be a point where it has pressed him too far.

“You’re missing dinner,” Chirrut chides when he reaches the landing, finds Baze’s side with ease and leans bodily against him.

Baze pulls him closer, arm draped across his waist, and closes his eyes because the rush that goes through him is partially love and partially something else, something cool and dark and not becoming of a Guardian. His eyes. “I wasn’t hungry. Someone needs to watch the walls.”

There are other things that people can do for credits, and Baze wonders how he would fare at trying his hand at one of them. He cannot fly a ship and does not own one, doubts anyone would take the time to teach him when they could simply snatch orphans off the streets for the task. He can translate texts but so can droids so that makes it useless to give him money for such a thing. The last idea that flashes through his mind is at once the best one, the one that makes the most sense, as well as the worst thing he could possibly do, and Chirrut goes tense against him as though he has been able to read it on him. Knowing Chirrut that is probably exactly what has happened.

“Baze.” Chirrut catches his face on the third try–he is getting better–and turns it toward him. “The darkness is not for you. Everything is as-”

Instead of listening to it–it hurts, my love, it ruins me–Baze catches him off guard with a kiss, gentle, soft, perhaps more chaste than the ones they exchanged when they learned how to kiss. Then his attention is turned back to the city by blaster shots that ring out in alleys and echo. How many children will be at the gates tomorrow? How will they feed them all?

Chirrut’s fingers on still on his face, looking at him, drawing across his mouth and the way that his brow is creased. Baze expects a fight. He expects Chirrut to chastise him and fuss about the fact that his belief is waning, that he is full of doubt, that he is heavy of heart. Chirrut, always unpredictable, spreads his arms out as the wind gusts around them, and it fills the sleeves of his robe. “Baze, it’s the sand saying hello!” And maybe his voice is not as bright as it was the first time that Baze heard this phrase, but his smile has not dimmed and the way his face changes around his eyes to show his glee is the same even if his eyes do not flash the way they used to.

And Baze wishes it was that simple because he wants to be comforted by the words and the gestures, he wants that to be enough to chase all the darkness away from him, wants that to soothe all his fears, but he knows that it will fall a little short. Almost nothing feels like enough anymore. It feels like he is standing at the edge of a pit, pushing everything into it and watching it swallow it all, never filling. He no longer feels like enough, If he is not enough, what can he ever offer Chirrut who remains bright and hopeful.

“Baze,” he calls again, reaching a hand out to fist into his robes and bodily drag him forward until Baze wraps his arms around Chirrut’s chest and holds him against himself. “Say hello back.”

It is stupid and young. It is silly. It serves no purposes whatsoever. Except that it might make Chirrut happy, which. Maybe that can be enough. In this moment. Baze takes a deep breath, has to talk himself into it because this is a ridiculous request and then says, “Hello,” in a small voice.

“Hello!” Chirrut shouts, though the wind rips it, sucks it into itself before it can echo properly across the sands.

“Hello,” Baze tries, a touch louder, and is rewarded with Chirrut saying it again. They take turns yelling it into the night until Baze feels lighter, until Chirrut spins in his grasp and tugs his face down for kisses that leave no room for darkness.


	3. Bells

Chirrut loses his sight when he is sixteen to a disease that chases its own tail across the expanse of the city until it burns out, but it does not go quickly. The healers tell him--only when he asks, only when he sits there mouth turned into a scowl and demands because he is not a child even if they are treating him like one, he will not break, he is an initiate of the temple of the Whills, he is strong enough for anything--the death toll, the slow and steady rise, which areas were hit the hardest. They tell him about the things the fever stole from people, other senses, the ability to walk, long term memories. Chirrut learns everything about it based on how it has ravaged NiJedha. He keeps it tucked inside so that he can remember it, recite it to himself when he begins to feel upset about the loss of his sight.

It is one thing. It is just one thing. And he can manage without it, he knows, but he still misses it. There are very many things in the universe that he would like to see again. There are very many things in the universe that he has never seen and never will now.

Sometimes it is hard not to relent, not to give in to the wave that rises, crashes, falls on his heart and his mind and his soul. It is black and blue and tinged red at the edges: fear, despair, and anger. And Chirrut does not want them. Chirrut wants to be gold and tan and orange and white like his initiate robes, wants to be light and bright and glowing forever. Joy, contentment, warmth, peace. He reaches for one side of the Force, and draws his hand back to find that the other side has laced its fingers with him.

All is as the Force wills it seems like a bitter statement to him now, seems like something people say after terrible things have happened and they have nothing else left to say at all.

Until Baze comes. 

Baze should move like the night, like a shadow. They have all been trained to be quiet, but Baze is perhaps the quietest of them all and always has been, able to walk through the halls without anyone noticing, curling into corners, reading everything in the temple, a shade, as silent as memory. For his size, Baze is quieter than he has any reason to be.

Or he was. 

Chirrut hears the approach from the end of the hall. It is heavy footfalls--he is too new at utilizing his sense in this way to recognize that it is someone making deliberately heavy footfalls, but he will learn that in time--slapping against the floors and something jingling like small bells or other bits of metal clacking together. When it pauses at the door, there’s a clearing of the throat that sticks at the end like pain. And there is a sigh, which he knows already, knows well because how many times has he been the reason for that sigh, only this one is different, less exasperated, less what have you done this time, and more full of pain, more full of loss. It is the sigh that gives him away.

“You took long enough,” Chirrut complains, tone only half hard but still biting because he has been here without his eyes and without his light heart and without Baze. That is too many things gone. He crosses his arms over his chest and turns his face away from the door.

There is the clinking and the heavy footfalls as Baze draws near, then there is the scent of him--something that Chirrut is a little ashamed to admit that he would know anywhere and it strikes him how much more aware of it he is now, that smell of temple incense and jasmine and dust from the library and the soap from the chores that Baze does and something under all of that, something that no one but Baze smells like--and the way the bed dips when he sits, hesitantly, at the edge of it. And Chirrut cannot see, but he imagines that Baze is fidgeting in that way he does sometimes, pulling at the threads of his robes or worrying at the beds of his nails, looking down, looking away because whatever is in front of him is something that he doesn’t want to see. Chirrut wonders how he looks now. Chirrut wonders whether he is gaut and pale and drawn from the fever. Chirrut wonders what his hair looks like, if it is messed up or too long since there has been no real opportunity to have it cut in a while. He wonders if it is flattering.

Chirrut wonders if he is still, as Baze said once in a rush of breath next to the jasmine tree in the garden with his head turned down and his fingers pulling at the fibers of his robes because he couldn’t bear to look, beautiful.

He means to be quiet until Baze says something, until Baze breaks, but it doesn’t work. It rarely works. Baze is silent so often that sometimes Chirrut will just talk to hear himself, to hear something, anything at all. Part of him wants to make Baze laugh because no one laughs like Baze, and then he remembers that he will never watch Baze laugh again, never be able to see how he throws his head back, mouth open wide and broad, how his eyes tend to draw slightly closed, how he just projects joy, boundless, limitless joy. The masters have tried to tame Chirrut’s foolery, tried to make him be more serious, but he. He could never bring himself to relinquish the ability to make Baze laugh like that. Not for anything. Not even for the Force.

And now he will never see it again. And that makes his heart hurt more. It makes that wash of black and blue and red all the stronger. So when he speaks, it is not a joke, it is not light. It is hard, mean, unbecoming of him, but he cannot be any better. Not at the moment. “That was you stomping in the hall? Did you hurt your leg? Or were you upset? Did someone make you come? Did the masters force you?”

There is a sharp intake of breath from the other, and Chirrut can feel the bed shift under him. He keeps his face turned away because he is sure that his expression is dark. Not that Baze is looking at him anyway. Why would Baze look at him now? He is surely not beautiful now. And neither is he kind. 

Baze’s hand on his own is startlingly because Chirrut didn’t hear him move, wasn’t expecting the touch until it is there. For a moment he considers shaking it off, telling Baze to leave, that he is fine without pity, that he is fine without company, that he is no longer in need of a best friend or. Or anything else. Whatever else they skate the edges of sometimes, both too young and inexperienced and afraid to give a name to, to explore.

I think you are beautiful too, Chirrut wishes he could say. 

I will never see you again, and that hurts me, Chirrut wishes he could say.

Instead he says nothing as Baze--whose hand should be larger than his, broader, considering his size, but it is not and that has always surprised him--lifts his hand to put it in his hair, to close Chirrut’s fingers around something, which Chirrut begins to explore as Baze speaks, his voice low, sombrous, filling every space inside his body and echoing back out. Baze has always sounded like some strange instrument that Chirrut would listen to forever. Chirrut turns his face towards him, tracking the sound of that voice.

“They wouldn’t let me come until now. They said you were recovering, and they thought my presence might be too stressful.”

“And you, of course, let them.” His tone is bitter as his fingers trace the thread. Baze’s hair is long, wavy, one of the many things that is beautiful about him. Normally he just puts it up or ties it back, sometimes braids it. This is the first that Chirrut has known him to put something like this in it, and he wants to try and memorize it, get every sensation from it. It might be the last time he gets to touch Baze, after all. He might no longer have any need for a friend who cannot see, who will fall behind in his studies, who may never become a Guardian at all. 

Baze drops his hand from where it had been lingering on the back of Chirrut’s as though he has been burned, but does not move any further than that. “No. When I expressed my distaste with their decision, I was put on punishment for two weeks. I wanted to be here. Everyday.”

Chirrut clicks his tongue in distaste and irritation. Liar, he thinks, but that is unfair because he has never known Baze to lie about anything. Never known him to, his brain supplies, and he shakes his head, focuses instead on his fingers slipping down the wound cord until. They hit something and a chime rings. His breath catches. He does it again. He shakes the cord, and it is the sound of many bells all at once. “Why,” he starts, but can’t get past the word because the idea of where it goes after that is strange. It hurts a little in the way that good things hurt. Like when Baze called him beautiful. Like when Baze laughs. Like that one day Baze pressed his lips to Chirrut’s cheek and made him forget how to breathe.

“I wanted you to be able to find me,” Baze says. 

“Oh,” he says, and it is such a small sound that he wonders if Baze hears it at all. It makes sense now. The bells, the stomping, the clearing of the throat. Baze is the quietest initiate; he can even sneak up on the masters. But he always wants Chirrut to hear him, to be able to locate him. He doesn’t want Chirrut to lose him. Chirrut’s fingers twitch the cord again, and the bells ring. 

Then his fingers fall, reaching out, trying to orient himself until he brushes against Baze’s cheek and that is what he wanted. He touches for a full minute, hand on his jaw as though trying to memorize it before he even asks. “Is this okay? I just. I can’t see you.” His voice breaks on the last two words, but he still manages to get them out.

When Baze speaks, his voice is low and thick, and Chirrut knows that sound, has heard it before when Baze is trying not to cry. “Yes. Of course. It’s fine.”

They sit in near complete silence as Chirrut traces his fingers over Baze’s face in a way that he never could have gotten the courage up to do before he lost his sight. He maps out his nose and his cheekbones and his chin. He lingers on Baze’s lips for so long that the other starts swallowing hard, loud enough for them to both hear it, which prompts him to finally move on to other things, though he makes a mental note to touch Baze’s lips again, longer, more, maybe with his own, and see what happens then.

His fingers are tangling into Baze’s hair, which is ringing with bells as he moves into the strands, on his way to find Baze’s lovely ears, when he speaks without meaning to. “I never told you how beautiful you were when I could see you.”

And the noise that comes from Baze is shocked and startled and deep in his throat. It is a noise that Chirrut has never heard before so he doesn’t know what it means. “Chirrut,” he says, stops, and Chirrut wants to run his fingers across his lips again to see what they are doing.

He tweaks his ear, and then lets his hand slip back, down, to cup his cheek in a way that is less about learning and more about comfort, more about just being able to touch. “You won’t be able to sneak up on anyone now,” he comments, shifting the topic to something else because he is scared. He doesn’t know where the other topic leads, and he doesn’t think this is a good time or place to discover it. One day, yes. Maybe soon. But it will be when he is not in an infirmary bed. It will be when he does not hear that wet sound of pity in Baze’s voice. It will be when he is less black and blue and red because Baze deserves more than that.

Baze deserves his light heart, and that is not where Chirrut is right now. It will take time to get back there.

At least, he thinks as his fingers find Baze’s lips again, at least I am not without you.

“Then you should never have a reason not to best me in sparring now,” Baze says, voice shaking, as Chirrut drops his hand down to skate over his neck, feels the vibrations under the skin press into his own flesh. They seem to sink into his bones.

“Keep talking,” he demands, knowing what he is asking of Baze, quiet Baze who has always preferred to look and listen, but needing it, needing so much to hear and feel and absorb as much of Baze as is available to him. He is cementing a memory. He will cement it over and over again, every moment he is able to, until it no longer matters that he cannot see Baze anymore because he will know him with every other sense he can. “Please,” he adds after a moment of getting no response, and Baze sighs, shifts his weight.

The next thing Chirrut knows, Baze is pushing at his side. “Scoot over.”

Chirrut obeys, and then Baze has settled himself down beside him, leaves one hand on his throat but puts Chirrut’s other hand on his chest, slips it under the many layers of robes until it is pressed against his skin--warm like standing in the sun, warm like the waters in the pools of the kyber caves, warm like the flush over his cheeks--and starts to talk. At first it is just the mantras, just the teachings of the temple, but as Baze continues, it changes. He starts to tell Chirrut all the stories he has read in the archives, and then he invents ones of his own. Baze talks for hours, and Chirrut is quiet, eyes closed, hands against skin, soaking in words and reverberations, filling himself up with everything that Baze is because it is beautiful, and it makes things inside of himself start to glow again.

All is as the Force wills it no longer sounds so bitter or cruel when Baze murmurs it, when it fills the cavity of his chest, when it escapes into the air on the edge of an almost laugh, skitters like something lovely and orange. And whenever Baze moves his head, which is often and Chirrut wonders but cannot ask if he is looking at him, there is the sound of bells.


	4. Nothing Simple

Baze thinks that their love begins with laughter.

The first time he meets Chirrut--who is ten years old and doing cartwheels in the temple garden much to the chagrin of the sighing but ultimately patient and benevolent masters who look at him with a mixture of fondness and irritation, as though they cannot envision him being anything else, as though they wish that maybe he would be something more but cannot tell him that because he is a child and putting that upon a child is unfair--the boy goes out of his way to make him smile. 

Baze is eleven, dirty, newly brought in from the streets and covered with a layer of Jedha grim that goes beyond the skin, that sinks intrinsically into the skin and the bones and the soul. A thing that can infect and fester and destroy from within. Baze has seen it happen over the years, people who just seem to melt away into nothing, people who let the weight of the city overwhelm them until they disappear, ghosts in the streets. And it is on him when he enters the temple, covers him, pollutes him, not so thick as it could be on others, but there, evident in the way that he moves and hunches and puts his hands up when people approach him because he isn’t sure of their intention. It carves a small, dark hole in his heart and curls up there, makes a cot in his mind to whisper things to him when everything else is quiet, about how he should run, about how these people want nothing to do with him either, about how eventually everything is going to fall apart.

It is sunny in the courtyard, but Baze feels as though he is under a cloud no matter where he moves, waiting out the eventual rain that will break and drown his body, cover him completely. The rains of Jedha seldom wash anything away. If anything they just seem to create more of a clinging film when they hit the dirt, wrapping it around all the areas that it might have missed, turning in into a liquid that can run down the throat, claws ripping into the secret places caught inside the body, which is both a known and an unknown, both the size of him as well as its own galaxy that he will never see or understand, bigger than he is and capable of carrying much more than his hands can hold. 

There is no rain, there are no clouds, and the winds that blow up off the sands are as warm as standing in the sun, as heated as the cobblestones under his feet, and yet Baze feels covered in shadow, feels like something deep within him is wet and shivering. He is watching the boy doing cartwheels and other tumbling that looks like it serves no purpose, and watching the masters watching the boy, and no one is looking at him, which is fine, which is okay, which is for the best actually because it means that no one will be disappointed in him. He can just stay where he is and no one will know. Until that boy with dark glinting eyes, and a smile bright, so wide that the pink of his gums is visible everywhere, a smile so wide that it looks like it hurts, and Baze wants to tell him to stop, walks over to him and wipes his hands across his face. Once, twice, three times. And Baze is too startled to do anything, just stands there, puzzled as this boy runs his fingers over his features, slowly, purposefully as though trying to brush something off, scrub something away. 

“There you are,” the boy says after a minute, though his hands linger on either side of Baze’s face just in case something else rises to cover him. “Hmph. Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered. All the grime was at least a good distraction from your ears.” And he is still smiling that smile so bright that it looks like it should hurt his face, but his eyes gleam in a way that says everything is okay, everything is fine, his eyes are an open door and a voice inside of a shelter saying come in, soft and gentle. 

Then he frowns, slowly, as though he doesn’t understand why he hasn’t gotten a reaction, but Baze doesn’t know what to do because he doesn’t have any experience with a situation like this one, doesn’t know how to react properly, doesn’t know what the boy wants. The eyes say come in, the smile looks too sharp, too gleaming, too big to be real, though he wishes it were. Yet the hands on his face are gentle, and the tone of voice is not mocking. And the boy is small but strong. “No? Not even a thank you? For the compliment.” The fingers go to his lips and start trying to lift them, to open the hinge of his mouth to look inside. His nails click against Baze’s teeth. “Here. Let me check your mouth. Maybe it got stuck.”

And it is. It is ridiculous. To be standing in a courtyard surrounded by flowers and masters in their solemn robes and have this boy who seems maybe just a little younger than him poking and prodding at his mouth. It is silly. And Baze pulls his head away, just a little, to get away from the questing fingers and all those teeth. But he smirks when he does it, he giggles, just a little, barely but enough. Enough for the boy to hear, and it shouldn’t be possible for that grin to get any wider, but it does until it looks like it will split his face clean in two. 

“No, no. You have to open your mouth or if will eat your tongue. And then we’ll have to make you a new one out of roots. A new one every day. And then you will be the root face boy, which will be worse than the ears. You don’t want that, do you?” He shakes Baze by the shoulders, shakes him like a tree being buffeted by a wind, and Baze does as he is told; he opens his mouth, and he laughs. It seems like eleven long years of laughter that has never been released, and it trills, spirals into the air between them, lifted up by the winds.

All the while Chirrut continues to shake him and never stops talking. “Wait. I didn’t know this was how it worked. I like this trick.” Never. Stops. Talking. Which Baze finds almost as funny as the shaking, as the strangeness of this boy just coming up to him out of nowhere to touch him. There is something about his skin, and his smile, and just the sense of him that is warm like the sun, and Baze is not so cold as he once was.

“Your ears are still a disaster,” Chirrut chides when Baze has managed to calm down a little, the peals of laughter finally dying down, and it is then that Baze realizes the other has not let go of him, not once. If his hands are not on his face or his shoulders as part of his game, then they are on his arms, settling gently, and he is not worried about their intentions at all.

“Maybe you should put the grime back,” Baze suggests because he doesn’t know what else to do. What else is there to do? His ears are his ears, and they cannot be controlled any more than he can change his feet or his arms or the way that his stomach growls when it needs food, the fact that he needs food at all, which is something that he has wished he could changed before because it would have made some things easier in the years that existed before now. 

The look on Chirrut’s face is so over the top, an exaggeration of something that Baze isn’t really sure how to label except that it is displeased, and then he shakes his head, fast and then slowly. Everything about Chirrut is an exaggeration. Nothing is ever simple or practical, everything is made massive in his gestures and his words. 

(And his love, though Baze will not discover this for many years. Not until they are eighteen and nineteen. Not until Chirrut grabs his hand in the middle of prayers one evening and tugs, that insistent, sharp little demand that Baze has never built up a resistance to and never wants to because it makes his heart slam up against the inside of his chest in the most delightful way. And, hand in hand because Chirrut never gets over wanting to touch him always, they sneak out of the temple and into the night. Chirrut makes Baze drive the temple landspeeder out to the sands to see the letters in the last fading light of the sun. In Jedhan, huge and imposing and an impossible feat, a feat that only Chirrut Imwe can ever be capable of, are the words, “I love you. Always.” Which is sweet like all the presents that Baze has left him, which is soft like all the poems that Baze has read him, which is already known in the kisses they have shared but now declared in the most Chirrut way possible. 

And then there are the other words, the ones that are slightly away from the others like a post-script. “You silly, romantic fool.”

Baze almost wrecks the speeder because he is laughing so hard while Chirrut clings to him, a string of curses falling from his perfect mouth the entire time, though none of them in anything approaching actual anger.)

“Nope,” Chirrut says with that blade gleam of a smile. “Never. There’s too much to see.”


	5. Hands

Chirrut listens to the sounds as Baze undoes all his armor, one snap or buckle or zipper at a time. There is something melodic to the noises, and there is a definite pattern, forced there not because it is necessary to undo them in a certain order but because Baze has always found calm in routines. Sometimes Baze can seem small without his shell, wandering and delicate despite his size, despite the fact that Chirrut knows there is enough strength in his hands to crush someone's windpipe, to break bones, to carry a repeater cannon across the city and back for up to twelve hours at a time without complaining about it once, though he will complain about other things as he always does.

Chirrut knows what those hands can do, have done, will do again when it is necessary, and it will be necessary because that is the type of world they live in now, but he would much rather think of those hands at other chores, other tasks, things that suit Baze more:

Baze painting in small, careful strokes, each one an apology because he is not better at it even though Chirrut loved every single thing he saw until he could see no longer and then Baze switched over to painting heavily, using a palette knife instead of a brush, and thick oil paint, telling Chirrut what the colors were, what the scene was as soon as it was dry and he tripped his fingers over one mountain, one valley, one long, feathering stream.

Baze baking in the temple kitchens, hair tied back and smiling shyly, flour and egg and milk and all manner of other ingredients spilled across his clothing and in his hair because he was always ready to show the younglings how to bake but they were never cautious so he ended up speckled every single time. Baze with his hands knuckle deep in mounds of pillowy but resistant dough while Chirrut sat on the sidelines, pretending to be bored but really just watching the play of muscles across Baze's back while he kneaded the dough, the flutters evident even through his undershirt. 

Baze copying and translating manuscripts, each letter a form of meditation, practiced and perfect. Baze hunched over a table in waning light for hours just to perfectly transcribe a page--the most beautiful page ever written--just to watch it disappear into a book that few ever opened because why bother when everything is readily available on a datapad. And how Chirrut would steal into the archives to find Baze's work, run the tips of his fingers over the perfectly formed lines as though they were the planes of Baze's body, the whorls of his soul.

Baze combing his fingers through his waves in the morning, trying to divide and smooth them into some semblance of order, enough to braid or put it into a bun, enough to get it out of his eyes and off of his neck. And how Chirrut would watch him get increasingly frustrated with the mass of it, threaten to have it shaved down to nothing, at which point he would leap up to save it, this thing so dear to him, and fix it himself while Baze hummed and graced him with touches that were just past the edge of companionable, just starting to flit over into the realm of something else, something startlingly new and perfect.

Baze's hands on his hips, squeezing into the flesh during a kiss, leaving unexpected bruises that he would murmur apologies for while pressing his lips and his tongue to them the next day such that Chirrut hoped every single touch would result in a mark, keep Baze's lips on him forever. 

Baze poking around in the machinery of the echo box or the lightbow, repairing circuits and cobbling things together to make everything work again, his fingers and hands smaller than they could have been considering his body but still big enough to be a pain when dealing with such intricate details. The way he would curse and then suck on them to soothe electrical burns. Chirrut, blind by then, just drinking in the sounds, already knowing what was going on because of a lifetime spent watching those hands, knowing everything they were capable of and more.

These are all things far more suited for his lover's fingers than the brutality imposed on them by the Imperial world sprung up around them. And those are all the things that Chirrut thinks about as he listens to the clicks of fastenings undone and the rustle of the flight suit as it is pushed down to the ground. He tilts his head, eyes closed even though it is unnecessary, but he does it sometimes, in moments like these, so that he can pretend, for an instant that he will be able to open them again and see Baze. As he has not properly seen Baze in far too many years, broad and tall and dressed simply once all the gear is off, nothing but a beige undershirt and beige smallclothes, skin the color of the Jedhan sand peppered with bruises and scars, each one a story that Chirrut can tell, though he elaborates because it hurts less when he pretends they were created in some adventurous fashion instead of by people who would kill them both easily without ever knowing or caring what the loss of one would do to the other.

Chirrut does not even have to reach his hands out or say a word to call Baze over to him; he just comes, settles on the floor in front of him and rests his head on his knee as though he is very young and seeking solace, and Chirrut runs his fingers through his hair and doesn't open his eyes. Not yet. For a little while longer, he wants to pretend that there will be deep, sad, and infinitely old--old as stars, old as the Force--eyes looking back at him, eyes speckled with love and an intense kindness that never fades, that emanates from Baze in waves no matter how much armor he puts on, no matter how many weapons he dots his person with, no matter how many deaths he carries. Chirrut keeps his eyes closed and pretends that he can open them at any time and catch the quirk of that well-loved mouth, those lips that he can make smile several hundred times a day and never be satisfied with, always want more of it, more of him. 

Baze puts a hand on his cheek, thumb brushing across his eyelashes, gentle. As gentle as when they worked in the temple gardens and Baze could coax the sickest plants back to health with his care and his touch alone as though they knew that here was someone who would never hurt them, who would protect them and shelter them and mourn them when they left. 

"Your heart is too big for your hands," Chirrut chided him one day when Baze buried a bird the younglings had found, barely more than a chick, knocked from its nest, dead on impact. Baze had wept openly, so much like a child himself when faced with the loss of life, and Chirrut had felt each tear like a blow to the sternum until it hurt him to breathe.

"Are yours any larger?" Baze had asked, each word catching in his throat as though there was still more sorrow waiting there, a pool of it just beyond his throat that he could dive into, languish in forever. 

The Force gives many things. To some, it grants strength and knowledge. To some, it bestows luck and the ability to fly ships into and out of impossible situations. To Baze, it gave all the care in the whole wide universe. To Baze, it gave a heart so full of kindness and compassion that it was wont to destroy him when the world around him could no longer be as soft.

To Chirrut, it gave blindness so that he could truly see.

Sometimes he wishes it would take that back.

He keeps his eyes closed even as he traces his fingers across the back of Baze's hand, feels the weight of his lover's gaze on him. The weight of the universe in Baze's stare makes it just as heavy as any repeater cannon, as any weapon ever made. If Baze can lift his own eyes, he can lift anything. 

"I love your hands," Chirrut says, fingers massaging each scar as though he can rub them all away, turn the clock back to when they were young and virtually unmarked just covered in paint or grease or flour or soil or ink. How many things has Baze dipped his hands in over the years? Why has all of his hard work been rewarded with blood?

Baze's answer is deep, a rumble of his voice that could move mountains. "They could be larger. Stronger." They could be better goes unsaid, but Chirrut feels it, doesn't need to hear it, has always known it is there.

The Force gave Baze this, too, this want to be everything to everyone and never feel like he is enough for anything. Chirrut wishes the Force would take that back, too.

"No," he says simply, opens his eyes and finds what always waits there, shadow with hints of lighter patches, but no Baze, no well-worn face and lips that he has kissed, no sad eyes wet with tears that rarely fall these days but still gather like a storm on the horizon. When Baze next cries, Chirrut worries that he will drown them all. He might not be able to see the tears gathering, but he can feel them in the way that Baze swallows. "If they were larger, you wouldn't let me hold anything."

Baze chuckles, not a true laugh but bright enough to send sparks through the Force that Chirrut can sense, can feel, as pure as any kyber crystal, as rare, and much more dear to him. "As if I could stop you from doing anything once your mind is made up."

"Beloved," Chirrut whispers, and Baze shudders like grass in the wind.

His hands, as they snake under Chirrut's robes, flesh to flesh, are as strong and gentle as silk cord, and though they know many things, are adept at many jobs, this is the one that Chirrut thinks he loves best.


	6. Kiss for Luck

“Kiss?” Chirrut asks, coming to a stop directly in front of Baze, planting his staff securely in the sand of the training yard, grinning like a fool. It's a grin that only gets wider, brighter, as he watches Baze blink rapidly, flush staining his cheeks, which he tries to hide by ducking his head, looking at the ground. Losing has never been something Chirrut takes gracefully, which he proves even more by using his finger to tip Baze’s face back up so he will look at him. “Just for luck, of course,” he adds with a wink that could easily make the declaration out to be a joke the way that everything he says can be a joke to those who don't know him well. 

Baze knows him well. Better than anyone. But Baze is also in the habit of closing his eyes to things he thinks will hurt him. Pretending this is a joke will make it easier for both of them. “For luck,” he agrees, and Chirrut does not miss the fact that his voice is pinched and strange. Does not miss it but does not question it either because even though he can worry someone away to their wit’s end with inquiries when he wants to, he knows that chasing it will only distress Baze. Plus then he might change his mind, and Chirrut will have ruined this chance.

Chirrut kisses him quick, refuses to let himself linger the way he wants to, deepen it the way he wants to, lose himself in it the way he wants to. Maybe that will happen another day. For now, he will be satisfied with the brush of lips against lips, closed, fast. They have had more intimate hugs. Then he frees his staff from the sand and vaults over the wall to spar because he is not sure he can watch Baze’s face, see what settles there like a storm across the sky. He needs action, not contemplation.

He wins the match even though his mind is on the kiss. 

Later, in the darkness of their room where they are so close but still too far apart even though he can, and often does, stretch his arm out to run his fingers across Baze’s skin, he claims that it was the kiss that allowed him to win. Baze just makes a noise in his throat that Chirrut has not heard before. They do not talk about the hundreds of matches Chirrut has won without a kiss; he would refuse to acknowledge them even if they did.

It becomes a routine, Chirrut stopping in front of Baze before a match, before a test, before prayers or meditation, anything. He will appear seemingly out of nowhere, sometimes breathless from running the span of the temple. “Kiss for luck,” he will say, and Baze obliges. No matter where he is or what he is doing or who he is with. He just stops and kisses Chirrut as though it is the same as breathing, the same as walking. Sometimes his face still flushes, but he kisses. Each and every time.

It quickly stops being just a routine. It just is. They don't talk about it or what it means or how sometimes, when he catches Baze alone, it is not just lips against lips in that hurried manner. Slowly it unfurls into something more like a rose blooming. Baze’s fingers on his cheek, along his jaw, brushing unruly hair from his face, tracing his ear. Lips that begin to part, linger, tongues that explore. The way one or the other of them will whimper or sigh, shift closer and more inextricably into the embrace. The hands that rove under robes; Chirrut is the first to explore that new ground and the noise that Baze makes when he does so is enough to send shockwaves through the Force itself he is sure. Or just through him. But the fine details of the thing don't matter much when he can draw that noise out of the other man anyway. 

The day before their Guardian trails, Baze won't stop pacing, muttering to himself, talking through meditations and forms and theories. He is so nervous that it stains the entire room and makes Chirrut restless. When he passes close enough to touch, Chirrut catches the sleeve of his robe, pulls him to a stop, pulls him to him, in front of him, traps him between his legs as Baze practically twitches with anxiety. Chirrut fists a hand in Baze’s robe to pull him down so they are face to face and he can trace the arch of Baze’s teeth worn lips with his eyes. 

“Kiss for luck,” he says, hoping to soothe him, hoping to calm him, something, anything to stop the pacing. And because he wants to kiss him, desperately always wants to kiss him, but has not figured out a way to do so yet without the words. They are a mantra, a magic spell, almost as sacred as any of the chants they use during meditation. Possibly more so since they only belong to them.

Baze is crowding him back onto the bed almost before he finishes speaking, and Chirrut hums out pleasure as the barest hint of teeth scrapes over his bottom lip. Sometime later when scorching kisses have melted into softer ones but still on the inevitable road to something else, something more than they've done before, Baze pulls away for a moment, eyes askance and hands busy fixating on the front of Chirrut’s robes because it has always been hard for him to look at someone when he has something important to say, and Chirrut has never begrudged him this habit because it is Baze; there is nothing about Baze, even the annoying things, that is not dear to him.

He is tempted to ask “What, beloved?” but says nothing because Baze is sometimes easily startled away from words so Chirrut cherishes every one he manages to wring from his lovely lips and infinitely lovelier heart. 

The words are quiet almost a sound more than speech, but Chirrut is an expert at listening to him by now, can understand anything he says no matter how low or gruff. “Kiss for love?” And Chirrut swears that the question mark at the end is as big as the universe itself. 

It feels like his face will split from grinning, that the brightness in his chest will rend his body in two and burn their entire moon to ash, and he wouldn’t mind at all because of that question, which is a declaration as much as anything but cautious in the way that Baze is always cautious, checking the temperature of the water before he gets in. Chirrut normally rushes right off the sides of buildings without even checking how tall they are, but even he has been careful here because there was so much to lose. “Very much a kiss for love,” he says back, hands buried in Baze’s hair to keep him there, to make him look at him now because he wants him to see as much as he wants to see. How this had been his goal all along even though he couldn’t find the words to express it that way, didn’t want to push, didn’t want to rush. So he invented a childish game to do it for him. 

A childish game that has more than paid off because Baze glows like kyber has been embedded inside of his skin. It makes him lovelier than normal, which is saying something because Baze is the sort of man that everyone stares at, who catches everyone’s eye even though he spends his time looking at the ground, face hidden in the mane of his hair, eyes averted, waiting for what he feels is inevitable criticism. But Baze is gorgeous and glorious and his. Maybe. Hopefully. It wouldn’t matter if he wasn’t lovely to anyone else. It wouldn’t matter if pilgrims to the temple didn’t sometimes stop in their prayers to just stare at the man with the deep eyes and the deeper voice and the broad shoulders. Chirrut would want him no matter what because his heart is a glimmering star inside a unfurled flower that keeps growing to try and surround and shelter all who come near it. 

He has never known a heart like the heart Baze has. He imagines there will never be another in the whole universe.

He is greedy because he wants it so. Even if it will never stop spreading itself thin, he wants it to come home to him, to curl up with him, to let him mend it when it breaks, and it shall break. It has broken quite a few times already, but it never loses its light. If anything, it just gets brighter because the cracks let it shine through more.

“I would rest in your light forever,” he sighs, lips so close that they brush across Baze’s as he speaks.

Baze blushes and shakes his head, averts his eyes, never one to know what to do with compliments, never one to understand words like that directed his way, and this is why Chirrut keeps his affections playful. It is easier for Baze to acknowledge that, after all. “Just kiss me,” Baze says after a moment, face still hot when he presses in and then there is no more time for words at all.

They become each other’s that night fully.

The next day, Chirrut asks, like usual, “Kiss for luck?” and Baze arches a curious eyebrow at him as though confused until Chirrut pulls at his ear. “I want to win. Kiss for luck first. Kiss for love later.”

Baze chuckles, the sound of an underground river thrashing its way through rock, and kisses him, light and quick, the luck kiss, before they enter.

When everyone asks how they managed to pass the trial on the first try, something rarely achieved, Chirrut just grins and claims that it was Baze’s kiss. Baze, of course, recommends studying, though he flushes when Chirrut quirks an eyebrow at him and taps his neck with a finger, reminding Baze of a bruise sucked there during their studying the previous night. Everyone else is polite enough to pretend not to notice how quickly the pair makes excuses to head to bed as well as the fact that they leave with arms slung around each other, Chirrut’s hand grazing over Baze’s backside as they walk.

In the years that pass, the phrases become code, used when different things are needed because it is easier, especially for Baze, to parse things in that way. Although it is common for Chirrut to be asking after luck more than love. Chirrut is the one who loves the fight, after all. Chirrut is the one who prefers to throw himself into increasingly difficult activities. 

When they attempt to guard the gate against Stormtroopers, Baze asks for the luck kiss, and Chirrut’s heart clenches, but he gives it.

When Chirrut loses his sight, it takes him sixteen tries before he can get the words to leave his lips, but he asks for the love kiss. (He thinks it hurts Baze more to hear it than it does for him to say it, which is why he tried to avoid it. Anything to keep mending that heart. It is so shattered these days, he thinks their moon will burn from under them in its blaze.)

When Baze returns from a stint with bounty hunters, scar across his face like a fissure across a mountain, all he can do is sign into Chirrut’s hands. He asks for love, and Chirrut gives it. Again and again. Until enough love has been given that Baze’s soul trickles home, follows his body, resurfaces from wherever he buried it in order to do what he has done. Chirrut doesn’t ask. It’s better that way. He knows it’s okay when Baze rumbles out laughter like an earthquake after he pulls at his beard and teases him, asking if he has become a bantha as a disguise. 

It goes on like this for years, the back and forth of asking for things needed in the best way that they have figured out when nothing else can be said. 

And then, one day, it is all that is left.

Before Scariff, Chirrut catches the sleeve of Baze’s flight suit, tugs him into a corner that he assumes is dark and away from prying eyes, which he has never cared about but sometimes Baze does. He assumes that Baze will make a wall of his body anyway. Few people bother a man with a cannon on their back. 

He knows even though it has not necessarily been said in so many words that they are not coming back from this one. The end is near, and it will hopefully be a good end that will mean something, that will help people, but oh how he wishes it were not the end. Even though there is the Force, and everything is forever in the Force. Even though he trusts that he will not lose this, not lose Baze, he will lose this sense of Baze. He wants to touch every inch of him, make sure that he has forgotten none of it, but there is no time. 

There is, however, time for one thing, but he doesn’t know which to ask for because the one seems too light, especially for Baze, and the other seems too final, and it has never been in Chirrut to give up, which is what it feels like even if it isn’t.

Baze is quiet because Chirrut is quiet, and neither of them is used to that. But Baze knows what it is to need time, and gives it willingly as he has always given so much of himself, willingly, freely, until there is almost nothing left.

“I will rest in your light forever,” Chirrut says, thinking about Baze’s heart, the light inside of him, the way he will look in the Force, the way he will overwhelm the Force completely.

He can hear the tears in Baze’s voice when he speaks; they are thick things he is trying to hide in the back of his throat, and the effort is threatening to choke him. “Chirrut, don’t.”

“Kiss for love?” Chirrut asks, and his voice wavers because Baze’s does. They have always been like this, the sun and the moon, taking turns as each, one reflecting the other.

Baze presses Chirrut’s free hand against his cheek so that he knows when he shakes his head. “Kiss for luck,” he says, and it’s a wonder that he manages the words at all.

When they kiss, it is both. Both the rush of battle, the reminder to come home quickly and safely, as well as the lingering stay, stay with me, you are always mine. It is not just both; it is everything. It is a lifetime spent together, falling in love with the universe together, falling in love with each other, all wrapped up into one thing. It is laughter and loss and a thousand small moments that flicker through his mind like the toys of shifting glass they sold in the Jedhan marketplace. It is the knowledge that the moon they called home is gone, and the only home that remains is the one they each made in the other. 

Baze kisses with the hope that this will not be the last, that this will buoy them through, that they will win as they have always done. Chirrut kisses because he cannot go on without the reassurance that this is steady, that it will continue when nothing else does, that it will remain when the end comes. 

As it turns out, neither of them are wrong.


	7. You Meant It

“I didn’t mean to kiss you,” Baze stammers, stuttering over his words the same way that he sometimes stumbles over his own feet in the courtyard because he is too busy watching Chirrut. The way that Chirrut walks. The way that Chirrut stands. The way that Chirrut twirls his staff effortlessly, laughing, head thrown back and smile bright, hands just moving as though they do not belong to the rest of his body at all, as though everything works independently of each other, flawlessly.

“Sorry. I didn’t,” he starts again because Chirrut is just looking at him in that careful considering manner of his that he gets sometimes when he is still and quiet, taking everything in, measuring the world around him to see where it is lacking, looking for the holes in the universe that he can patch, that he can guard, that he can explore. Chirrut is looking at him so intently that Baze feels his entire face burning from the weight of the stare, the flush creeping down his neck and up into his hairline, slow licking flames that will consume him if they continue to burn. 

He is not sure that he would mind.

He should get up. He knows that he should get up, let Chirrut up from where he has pinned him against the ground, winning one of their spars for once, and disappear, flee into the bowels of the temple, escape into the kyber caves below with their cool water and sighing crystals, their solitude that always welcomes him even if it screams too loudly for some of the other initiates. Baze hears things differently from the others, feels them differently, and the caves never overstimulate him in the least. They are a balm, a comfort. If he had the power to be anywhere in the universe instantaneously, he thinks that he would allow himself to be transported directly into the caves, to hide in the darkest corner where no one would find him, to wait until night and then creep out into the sands of Jedha, disappear forever so that he will never have to face the inevitable shame that is already rising, icy cold tendrils that war with the licking flame.

Chirrut has still not said a word, not made a move, just continues to lie there, considering with his careful, dark eyes that glimmer with unfathomable galaxies. If the Force has made a home anywhere, it has settled inside of his eyes, Baze is as sure of this fact as he is sure of anything in the world. The Force moves through Chirrut the way that the sand stirs in the wind, unstoppable and dangerous at times. It makes him even more beautiful, adds to the layers of perfection that he was born with, that years of training have sculpted onto his body. Beauty lingers in everything that Chirrut is even when he smiles too wide, even when he laughs too loud, even when food sticks in his teeth or bruises bloom like flowers on his arms after training. Even when Chirrut was skinny and gawky, some strange bony bird with no wings, no feathers, he was lovely in his way.

Baze has always been drawn to beautiful things; he cannot help himself around them. Flowers, books, paintings, vases, a perfectly baked loaf of bread, the sand, the temple. Chirrut. So much in the world is lovely, but nothing is as lovely as the man still pinned below him, the man who is unmoving, the man who is unspeaking, whose weighty gaze has not faltered, not once, but then it is no surprise because it never does. Baze has never seen Chirrut back down from anything. It is just another sparkling facet of his gem.

While Baze cannot make himself look away, he also cannot read the expression, cannot fathom what is happening in the depths of the other man’s eyes, and it makes him uncomfortable. He cannot look away, cannot move, even though he knows that he should, even though it is the only course of action that makes sense. He considers apologizing for the act again, but he is concerned that Chirrut will ask questions about why he did it, how long he has wanted to. Worse he is worried that Chirrut would chastise him severely, tell him that he never wants to see him again, their friendship torn asunder forever. It is an unfounded fear surely because he and Chirrut have discussed the tenants of the Jedi, their rules against attachment and found them wanting, Chirrut especially. Yet it lingers, gnaws, worries at the edges of his heart along with the icy fingers of shame for having acted on the compulsion, for having, after pinning Chirrut to the ground, after seeing Chirrut flash him that proud smile, given in to the impulse to lean down the rest of the way and kiss him. Just once. Just barely. 

Barely even a kiss. 

Still enough to be his undoing, their undoing. If Chirrut will ever say anything if Chirrut will ever do anything except breathe slightly faster than normal, which has to be from the sparring, and look at him with endless, deep eyes whose meanings are hidden. 

“I didn’t,” he starts again, but Chirrut rolls his eyes and moves finally, lifting a hand to place it over Baze’s mouth. There is dirt and sweat, but Baze cannot even bring himself to mind that much because he is too focused, too fixated on what Chirrut will say.

“Yes, you did,” he says. “You meant it.”

Baze feels transparent, run through, completely and utterly laid open and bare as though Chirrut’s eyes are able to peer into his heart and soul. He wonders whether Chirrut has known and just been ignoring it this entire time because it was too embarrassing for him, because he didn’t want to hurt Baze’s feelings by calling it out into the open and telling him how silly he was being. There is, of course, no way that Chirrut feels the same. There is no way. Baze is dull in all the ways that Chirrut is bright. Baze is slow in all the ways that Chirrut is quick. Baze is ugly in all the ways that Chirrut is lovely. And the Force might be in both of them, but it is strange and garbled in Baze, a different thing entirely while it is a swirling lake inside of Chirrut. 

He tries to make a move to go, but Chirrut’s grip is sure, the hand coming off his mouth to lock behind his neck, his legs twining around Baze’s, and this position is quickly becoming even more compromising. He is acutely aware of how close they are pressed together, how much of Chirrut’s body is against his even though separated by clothing. 

“Chirrut, please,” he says and cannot look at him now, moves his gaze just off to the side, studies Chirrut ear because it is safer than whatever he is afraid will bloom inside the darkness of his eyes. 

“You meant it,” Chirrut repeats, and he slides the index finger of his free hand across Baze’s lips in a way that makes him shudder at the contact, flames ignited again and dancing despite the shame, despite the fear, despite the fact that he knows he should flee. 

“You meant it, but you’re not terribly good at it yet.” The words are light, the tone teasing, flirting, the way that Chirrut often charms strangers who don’t know well enough to stay away from him when he starts spinning his tales in the marketplace about the Force, when he promises to swap stories for trinkets because Chirrut likes shiny things the way that Baze like beautiful things. Chirrut stores them up, hoards them, tucks them away in their room, in his pockets, and under the bed, and in the windowsill to catch the light and throw rainbows on the walls. They are supposed to live simple lives, but Chirrut likes things to run his hands over, enjoys all the shiny things of the physical world. 

Chirrut likes shiny things so, of course, Chirrut would not like him. Not like that.

Baze swallows and closes his eyes because otherwise, he will look. He will look at Chirrut’s face and something there will be his undoing, and he will say something he shouldn’t and then everything will be ruined. There is no telling what game Chirrut is playing, there never is because Baze cannot keep up with him most of time, is happy to trail behind, following. 

“Baze,” Chirrut says his name like it is a heavy stone on his tongue, and his fingers creep up his neck into his hair even as he continues to run fingers over his lips and cheeks with the other hand. There is a moan in Baze’s throat that he shuts his teeth on before it can escape.

“Baze,” Chirrut repeats, and his voice is closer, his breath ghosts across Baze’s lips. There is something in his tone now that Baze does not know, would not even dare put a name to for fear of being wrong.

When he opens his eyes, Chirrut is so close that he almost goes cross eyed looking at him. He is right there, but there is a softness in his eyes now, something small and vulnerable, the way he was when they were young and he jumped too far, tried too hard, hurt himself. Or when the Force showed him things he did not want to see, things a child should not see. He looks vulnerable and scared, the way that Baze feels, and he does not want to see Chirrut like that.

Baze swallows the lump in his throat and tries not to focus on all the points of contact, the fingers in his hair, the fingers on his lips, the way that he can feel the steel of Chirrut’s body beneath him, the legs wrapped around his to keep him there. He pushes that awareness away and focuses instead on those glittering eyes, the soft almost smile, the flush of Chirrut’s skin, which is the color of the setting sun when the world is red and gold. He does not think about the way he would like to trail his tongue over that sunset to find out how it tastes, whether it would make him groan or laugh, shudder or quake. 

He does not shine, after all, and Chirrut would not want him. 

“I meant it,” he admits, though it takes him three tries, three false starts. “I meant it, but I should not have done it.” He thinks Chirrut will let him go once he has acknowledged that he was wrong, that he has crossed the line, but Chirrut stays where he is, close enough that Baze thinks they will melt into each other, dissolve and create one being instead of two. He thinks he could be happier that way.

“On the contrary, you should have done it sooner. And more. Then you would be better. But we can rectify that. No one becomes a master of anything without practice.” Chirrut has moved both of his hands to the back of Baze’s neck, fingers trailing into his hair, and he is so close. He is so close that he is the only thing that Baze can see, the only thing that he can hear, louder even than the rush of his blood in his ears, which seems like it should be deafening but does not block out Chirrut’s words, the meaning inherent in them.

“Are you,” he starts, meaning to ask if Chirrut is serious, meaning to ask if this is some game, meaning to ask if he is interpreting the words correctly because surely it cannot be that. It could never be that. Right?

Chirrut stops him before he can finish speaking, stops him with a kiss that is scalding even though it is gentle, even though it is slow and languid and close mouthed and does not last long. It feels like floating on his back in the kyber pools. It feels like sitting among the crystals at peace. It feels like the Force is a blooming flower inside his mouth whose petals insinuate his entire body. “I meant to kiss you,” he whispers into Baze’s ear, presses another kiss below on his jawline. “I mean to kiss you several hundred times more. Tonight. Thousands later.”

“Chirrut,” his voice breaks, feels like it shatters because Chirrut sucks at his neck just then and everything inside of his mind loosens and disengages. All he can think to do is cradle the back of Chirrut’s head in his hand, and cant his hips forward greedily even as Chirrut kisses a line down his skin. After a few moments, Chirrut captures his mouth, and Baze sighs when Chirrut’s tongue presses against his lips, encouraging him to deepen the kiss, which he does without a moment’s hesitation. This, then, seems to be better than anything he has imagined, a flame that burns without destroying him, just warm and welcoming, a steady hand on his arm in the darkness, a voice that promises not to let him fall, not to let him go alone. The same sort of words that Chirrut uttered the first time they slipped into the kyber caves together, I have you if you have me.

Perhaps he says it aloud without meaning to because the next thing he knows, Chirrut is murmuring, “I have you,” to him as though it is a prayer, as though it is a reassurance and running his hands down Baze’s back in soothing motions.

“Why?” he asks before he can stop himself. 

Chirrut pulls away enough that he can look at him, can swipe a thumb across his cheek, and his eyes are soft and wide and wanting, the way they get when he sees something shiny in the shops and declares that he must have it. “Because you have me. You always do. Without me asking. Even when I probably do not deserve it. Because you are the best person I can imagine. Because you glow soft and lovely like a star. Because you would never hurt anyone.” He runs another finger across Baze’s lips. “Because you are quite possibly the most attractive man I have ever seen in my life and thinking about it makes me feel things I should not say aloud.”

“Blasphemous,” Baze mutters, cheeks flushed, but not just purely out of embarrassment, and swats at him gently as though to chastise him for it. Part of it is desire, fierce and flickering, and he remembers once again how closely they are pressed, how intertwined they are on the floor.

“You love it, though, don’t you?” Chirrut teases and runs his tongue over his teeth slowly, and Baze cannot help but track the motion with his eyes and then shift his hips slightly. He should make the effort to move, though Chirrut does not seem like he minds in the slightest. “Why me, then, Baze Malbus, when you could have anyone?”

The question makes him laugh because part of it is the height of absurdity, but he sobers quickly, runs a hand across Chirrut’s face hesitantly, as if he is smoke, as if he is porcelain, as if he will crack or disappear under his caress. “Because you are infuriating.”

Chirrut laughs, sing song and clear and sweet, but then prods him with a finger to the side to continue. 

“Because no one is as fierce as you. No one is as clever. No one shines as bright. I feel alive with you but also calm and safe, like there is nothing in the universe we cannot face if we are together. All I need to be brave is you next to me.” 

Chirrut clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth in reproach. “You have always been brave, you just refuse to see yourself. It’s okay. I’ll teach you how to do that as well as how to kiss properly.”

“Am I that bad?” Baze asks, his voice going up petulantly at the end. 

“I don’t know. Kiss me again and remind me,” Chirrut says, batting his eyelashes and smirking in a way that makes Baze’s heart beat so fast he thinks it might burst.

And he does. Kisses him again and again on the floor of the training room until a cleared throat reminds them of where they are and they quickly make their apologies and retire to their room. Where Chirrut insists Baze try it again.


	8. Borrowed Time

They have always slept together. Curled around each other, a puddle of limbs, tangled in holding to the point where it could be impossible to move, Chirrut bodily on top of him occasionally, a perfect pressure to lull him to sleep when nothing else will, their breaths and hearts perfectly in tune, perfectly in time. Baze has not known a night without Chirrut there since he was young and they huddled together to keep out the cold, to drive away the nightmares that could linger in both of their minds, strange Force-sensitive bleed-overs the masters always called them. Nothing ever calmed either of them except the touch of the other. It was always them, together in the blankets, Baze’s head tucked under because he was scared of the big darkness of the temple but not the warm darkness underneath, Chirrut with hands lingering on his arms or side or back. It never mattered how uncomfortable the position was, how stiff one or the other of them might be the next morning, the togetherness, the ability to sleep had made up for all of it.

There was a rule between them that even if they argued, itself something uncommon and far between, because most of their bickering boiled down to teasing, practically another in a long line of verbal foreplay, affection wrapped in the paper thin shell of annoyance because that was simply how they were, that nights, were still spent together. It was easier to come to terms with disagreements in the dark. It was hard to hold a grudge or remain angry with fingers pressed against faces, voices low and sleep slowed to the point where anything could be explained, everything could be unwound, unfettered from hot emotions and laid bare like their skin. They never went to bed mad at the other, and they never went to bed without the other.

It is silly, and it is slight, and it is strange, but one of the things that Baze thinks as he screams, “Come back,” in desperation, as he watches Chirrut once again galavant off on his own, is that he will never be able to sleep again because he cannot sleep without Chirrut. (He also cannot wake without Chirrut, but everything is a rush, and he cannot get to that fact before the blasts hit, before the universe tumbles off its stand to crash like a vase against the hard ground, before it feels like everything inside of his chest has been torn out as Chirrut is struck.)

How he reaches him, how he manages to cover the stretch of sand between where he was and where Chirrut lies, broken, bloody, smaller and more vulnerable than Baze has ever seen him before, is lost to him. Baze does not know. Perhaps the Force willed it. Perhaps the Force remembers them, hands interlocked in prayer, heads tipped together, murmuring the words of the Whills to it, reaching for it, slipping into it like cool water, always hand in hand, though Chirrut could have made it further without him, he refused to leave him behind. Maybe the Force remembers, the way it knows everything, is in everything, maybe it remembers how they loved it, and it betrayed them. Perhaps it feels sorry so it lets him get there. To say goodbye. To say hello.

Or maybe it is just Baze and his own sheer force of will that allows him to cross without injury, to cradle the only thing in his life that has never faltered, the only person who has always glowed no matter how hard the world around them gets. It does not matter how he gets there. All that matters is that he is there. Because Chirrut cannot sleep without him beside him.

“Don’t go,” he pleads, though he knows it is too late. It is too late. He can feel it. It radiates and pulses. It is in everything, the stuttering of his heart, the sputtering and diminishing sense of his life in the Force that Baze can feel, though it is changing more than anything, slipping away and drifting, it is not something that Baze can follow, not right now at least.

Chirrut cannot sleep without him–Chirrut cannot wake without him, but Chirrut will not wake ever again–so he holds him until he has slipped away, until there is nothing left in the body of the man whose lips and hands he knows, the intimate planes of his body, the legs and muscles, the exact timbre of his laugh. When his body becomes just a thing, heavy without the lightness of his spirit, separated from who and what Chirrut Imwe was, then Baze can set him down, then Baze can face the blaster bolts.

He is going to die, he knows. He knew. From the moment they left Jedha, he thinks that they have been on a ticking clock, meant to be swallowed in the destruction of their moon, the only home they ever knew aside from the one they made inside of each other. Borrowed time.

When it comes, a blaze, a pain the sort that Baze was not expecting, but does not mind because it is not as bad as watching the love of his life die in front of him, Baze is not surprised, is somewhat pleased. He could not have slept without Chirrut, after all, could not wake without him.

Could not have lived.

In the Force, their conjoined hands trickle one into the other. When they touch, it is impossible to tell where the edges are, where they are separate.

“Look for the Force, and you will always find me,” Chirrut had said, says again, teasing, kisses Baze’s nose in a way that is strange in their bodies not bodies because they are everywhere and nowhere and together.

He does not understand, not completely. It does not matter. He does not need to because Chirrut holds his hand, and Chirrut touches his face, and Chirrut can see again. He knows this without asking. He knows everything without asking, and Chirrut can tell him anything without talking.

Not that this will stop him.

“Impatient man,” Chirrut chides.

“Only when it comes to you,” Baze says, curls around him, tucks him into his arms and holds on in much the same way he would when they were children, when the nightmares came, when all they had was each other, when they could not sleep or dream without the other near. Now, he thinks, perhaps they are dreams or energy or something else altogether different, completely unknown. They will find out together, the way they have always learned everything.


	9. Wonder Together

“Please don’t do this,” Chirrut’s words are a rush, spoken at Baze’s back because he will not turn around to look at his face. 

Everything will stop if he does. He will have no forward momentum; he will simply be transfixed in the bright burn of Chirrut’s eyes and Chirrut’s smile, the line of his jaw, the flush of color across his cheek. Nothing outshines Chirrut in his eyes, and he has to look away in order to manage to do anything else, especially something as dangerous and foolhardy as the mission that he accepted. 

Go into the sands, they said. Go into the sands past the statues. Go to the far away kyber caves and come back, tell us about what you find. We need to know if the guards remain. We need to know why no one has contacted us. We need to know how far the Empire’s hand has reached. We need to know if they have fallen.

Speeders do not cross the sands well. It gets into their gears, slowly winds them down into nothing. Between the sand and the cold, it is a wonder that tech makes a foothold on Jedha at all, but he cannot use it to cross the sands. Nor pack animals. The only things that Baze can employ are his own two feet, his legs, his sturdy, bulky body. It is like he was made for this trip all along. This trip and nothing else in the whole wide universe. The Force, Jedha herself, created him for this journey so how could he say no?

Ah. He can never say no to anything. It is his gift as much as his failing.

“Baze,” Chirrut’s grip on his wrist is sure and tight, fingers steel from all the training and all of his own willpower. Nothing and no one in the universe can topple Chirrut Imwe, can move him if he does not want to be moved, can change his mind when he is set in it. Like the statues in the sands, Chirrut will remain forever, Baze thinks, he will not let the winds of life chip away at him little by little, make him less.

Baze can be made less. Baze is made less with every day that passes, with every injury inflicted by the Empire whether physical or spiritual. He is too soft. He will never stand all on his own, sure to crumble and fade away. “I hold you back,” he told Chirrut once, and the lightning in his lover’s features at those words shook him to the core such that he has never dared to utter it again.

But it is true. What wonder would Chirrut be if he were not so wrapped up in loving him? Baze would like to know. He would like to see him in his crowning glory. Perhaps Chirrut will find it if he leaves for the sands.

“Don’t do this. It’s a fool’s errand. It’s doomed.”

When Baze opens his hand, Chirrut’s fingers slip into it as easily as ever, and they might be flesh wrapped around steel, but they are still warm and comforting to hold. He loves them.

“I have to go, Chirrut.” The words are hollow even to his own ears.

“You don’t have to do anything.”

I have to love you, he thinks but does not say. It is in the meat of my bones, and the tiny sacs in my lungs. I have to love you. Through anything and everything. 

“It’s for the temple.” Which should be enough to make Chirrut understand, but Chirrut never likes it when he does not get his way. 

“Fuck the temple.” The words are so cold, so hard, edged and sharp, spit out like knives to clatter at his feet. Chirrut’s tone is unlike him, no laughter, no teasing, just something solid and sure, as steady as the rock under their feet, as serious as death, as unwavering as the Force.

It is those words, that tone, that finally convince Baze to turn to look at him, to see not flashing eyes, no smile, but tears and a mouth warring with itself and losing to sorrow. He had expected anger and bargaining, but he had not expected this, a look as injured as if he told the other that he never loved him. It is a rare thing, indeed, to see Chirrut cry. “My love,” he starts, fingers reaching to brush the tears away even as Chirrut catches his hand and holds it to his face, so tight as if he never wants to let it go.

“If you go, I go.”

It should topple him to the ground, that look, those words, but Baze is trying to be strong, to do better, for Chirrut, for his sake. So that he will not be hampered by his weight. “Someone needs to stay and take care of the younglings. Remember. Look for the Force and you will always find me.” As close to a goodbye as Baze can manage.

Yet it is not enough to fool Chirrut who presses closer, leans bodily into Baze’s chest, twines fingers into his hair and tucks his face against his neck. “Do not echo my vows back to me and expect me to linger. If the temple can manage without you it can manage without me. I do not want to manage without you.”

Baze is not sure if the declaration breaks his heart or overfills it to bursting, but he cannot deny him now. “It is cold in the sands,” he reminds him.

And Chirrut, who hates the cold, kisses his neck, clenches his hand tighter. “Guess who gets to warm me?”

Perhaps he will never know what sort of wonder Chirrut could be without him. Hopefully, the wonder they are together is enough.


	10. Abounding

The cold feet on his bare back wake him up, jarring him from a dream wherein birds filled the sky, swooping, crying, singing, beats of wings, feathers, all filling the air, and all the birds had bright white wings like kyber light, pure and unmarred by the ruddy sand of the Jedhan desert. All the birds were laughing, their voices as known to him as the feet pressed against him and just as beloved. “Chirrut,” he sighs, groans, swipes an arm out without even opening his eyes, fingers brushing over well-known flesh. Cold. Chirrut is cold. Like the drafts that get in through the cracks in the temple walls and send everyone scuttling to bed as soon as possible because no one enjoys being out in the wind that blows from the sands through NiJedha. 

Except for Chirrut. Who has always enjoyed sneaking out onto the roof or the gardens or into the training halls, the classrooms, the archives to enjoy the steady stillness of night or look at the stars or watch the blossoms that only bloom in the darkness, too shy for sunlight, radiant in the moonlight like Chirrut himself. It is not uncommon for Chirrut to go walking, layered in many robes, typically his own and then a set of Baze’s over them, a sight that would be comical if it wasn’t so dear, but he normally pulls and prods until the other joins him. Chirrut is a great many things, but solitary is typically not one of them. If either of them is bound to go shuffling off into the night alone, to go anywhere alone, it is Baze. 

The feet slip higher up his back until Baze turns away from them, rolls to face where Chirrut lies, traps his legs between his own even as he loops an arm about his waist to pull him close, press them bodily together to drive the chill away. Chirrut tucks his face against his neck and kisses, nips, sucks until the air is full of Baze’s throaty, sleepy moans, until his body feels like a string pulled taught and vibrating. His fingers splayed across Chirrut’s back move lower to cup his ass, knead into the yielding flesh, pull him closer, and Chirrut simply chuckles against his throat, that sound igniting yet more sparks that flutter through his body, gather in his groin, pull him slowly, slowly from sleep intoxication to another sort altogether, one that fills all his waking hours, the delirious joy of being in love with this chimerical man who always seems to be changing, moving, quick of mind and fleet of foot and lovely in body, illuminated and funny. It used to make Baze feel eclipsed, lost, stuck in the shadows and completely unseen because how could he ever expect the sun to find him when it was so bright, but the sun had seen him. Chirrut had seen him. Down to the quick of him and beyond, seen something lovely and wonderful, fell in love with him quietly and slowly and completely, he said, in a way that was altogether not like Chirrut himself. These days Baze does not feel overshadowed, easily ignored. He feels warm, bathed in the light of a sun that he can touch whenever he wants, kiss until Chirrut is panting and desperate against him, lovely, giggles like the bird cries in his dream.

Chirrut’s fingers, still slightly cool but warming quickly, dance down his arms, across his thigh, into his hair. Chirrut can somehow seem to touch everywhere at once, and Baze thinks, wonders, dreams sometimes that his love has many arms, many hands, all of them delightedly touching him, stroking him, caressing him in the darkness as if he is some thinly carved stone easily broken instead of rough hewn from rock, thick and sturdy, an immovable object. While Chirrut knows he will not break, knows that pressure and bites and tugs on his hair all make him hard and greedy, it always seems that Chirrut touches like feathers, as if he is touching Baze’s gentle, easily bruised heart instead of his thick, well-worn skin. Each tap of his fingers, every kiss, and cant of his hips against him wakes Baze more, drags him from succumbing to slumber to succumb to Chirrut instead, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. Sleep is for later. One day it will be for always. He will enjoy Chirrut as much as he can before that comes, hopefully very far in the future, hopefully not near at all. If he could stop time, he would pause it here, in the middle of the night, when Chirrut is slightly chilled and threaded around him as though they are just yarn in a tapestry, woven together to form a picture, to tell a story of a love that is abounding and true, strong enough to withstand anything because they are together. If he could stop time, Baze would never leave the circle of these arms.

“Where did you go, love?” he asks and then curses as Chirrut’s teeth find the rise of his collarbone to worry. No part of Chirrut’s body seems cold now, but that might just be because of the fire that his ministrations have woken under Baze’s skin. He cannot tell, cannot focus very well with all the delicious sensations filling his head, making him breathe faster. He cups the back of Chirrut’s head with one hand while the other remains on his bare ass, gripping in a way that is slightly possessive, something that Chirrut long ago told him he liked, hissing, “Harder” into his ear almost demandingly when Baze had first dared try it.

There is not much moonlight that makes it into their room, but there is enough for Baze to catch a glimpse of Chirrut’s eyes as he pulls back to look at him, and Baze marks the way his eyesight diminishes the way someone else might count days in a prison cell. One day, the master healers had said, all the sights of the world would be stolen from him. Then there would probably only be a soft haze, a sense of light and darkness and all the differences existing therein. They both mourn this knowledge in their separate ways, and if Chirrut looks at him more often, fondly stares all through meals and study and prayers, Baze never mentions it, tries not to bristle at the unwavering attention. He also tries not to fret over him because Chirrut has never taken well to coddling.

“Just the moon,” is Chirrut’s answer, the words as soft as his fingertips trailing down Baze’s chest, lower, lower, likely prepared to tease until he gasps his pleasure out in hitching breaths.

More and more often it is the moon that Chirrut seeks as the months tick down to the final slamming of the cell door. Baze does not understand this much. The stars, the flowers, the quiet in the rooms, the glow of the kyber, all of this he would understand more than the moon, who seems silent and hovering, distant and cold, wavering sometimes in devotion, lost to the night. A million little flaws. There are better things to see in the world. Like the sun. Like Chirrut. He presses a kiss to Chirrut’s forehead, and the man looks up at him with his smile full and bright, gums showing. 

“Why the moon so often?” Baze has asked this before and only got a hum as an answer because sometimes Chirrut enjoys being the silent one, likes to tease instead of answer, wants Baze to cajole information out of him, which Baze is not always willing to do.

Tonight, though, is different. Tonight when the slight edging in Chirrut’s eyes seems bigger than before, makes his gaze flit a little to the side until it settles, he seems more inclined to talk. “I’ll tell you but first a question.”

Baze arches an eyebrow but nods, running a finger over Chirrut’s lips, untangling their legs a little in anticipation but staying close because he can never be anywhere but next to him when given the chance. If he had his way, Baze would never let go of him, would cling to a hand or a shoulder or an elbow or lock their lips together always, breathe him in like the scent of cardamom in the kitchens, infuse him into his lungs and heart and blood the way that he has sunk into his soul.

“What did it feel like for you, falling in love with me?”

Baze has answered this before, but he never tires of talking about it because it is as close as he can come to poetry. “It was all at once. A burning. Like falling into the sun, like touching kyber, like swallowing fire.”

Chirrut smiles, and Baze wants to kiss him, kiss that serene spark of joy and wonder and awe until it dances on his tongue, but he holds back because he would like to see where this is going. Kissing Chirrut can change his mind, rocket him onto one course when he had been keen on another. “And I fell in love with you slowly, patiently, in turns.” 

Baze nods because he knows this part, too, though it is still a wonder to him that Chirrut fell in love with him at all.

Chirrut’s mouth is right there, pressed so close to his own that their lips brush and send shockwaves through his body when he speaks. “Like the moon.”

When he chuckles, soft, low, a rumble, Chirrut steals it, steals his breath, slides his tongue into his mouth even as his hands grip and clench and pull them even closer together. And then Baze can think of nothing at all except the gasping and the kissing and chasing pleasure through the darkness. 

He does not think about the meaning of Chirrut’s words until later. How Chirrut is drinking in the moon, savoring it, trapping it in his mind, because it reminds him of Baze. Much the same way that he drinks in the sight of him during the day. The night next when Chirrut slips from their bed, Baze follows him, and they sit on the roof together, wrapped in blankets, watching the moon, and if Chirrut looks at him more than the moon, he never comments on it.


	11. Five More Minutes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Drabble written to accompany [this image](http://naniiebimworks.tumblr.com/post/164674217868/paired-practice-with-chirrut-is-going-to-be-the) by Nan.

Five more minutes, Chirrut had told him. The problem was that five had turned into ten, which then turned into fifteen and was now beginning to approach twenty. Baze knew this because he had been counting them down as steadily as he had been counting his own breaths, using the rhythmic in and out of his air to find his center, keep his calm, attempting to stop the shaking developing in his arms and legs, threatening to topple him. If it had not been for Chirrut, he would have given up the endeavor long ago, but it was Chirrut. It was always Chirrut. Balancing effortlessly on their clenched hands as though this was no harder than meandering through the halls of the temple hand in hand, quietly discussing love hidden under sixteen other topics but achingly evident to both of them.

It was Chirrut, and Baze was not going to fail him in anything even if it meant pushing his body to its own limits and beyond. Just a minute more, he told himself with each one that passed, trying to fool his body into believing him. 

“It’s all about control. It’s all about the mastery of the self,” Chirrut had said with his broad, split-faced grin, eyes askance but gaze as much on Baze as it could be, as it ever was because even though he could not see he always managed to see him in the way that mattered.

And Baze had sighed and relented. As always. Though one of his commands, themselves rare and far between in their companionship, had been that Chirrut was not allowed to talk because Baze knew that if he did it would inevitably turn to something that would prompt him to laugh--Chirrut was always funny, always making him laugh or smile, quake silently with amusement that stretched into the heart of him, into the very core of his being and then beyond into the Force itself, Baze was sure--and if he laughed, if he so much as breathed wrong, Baze was certain to topple them both.

This was not for him. This was for Chirrut. That fact made it more important than thousands of other tasks in the world.

“You’re doing very well,” Chirrut said, and Baze groaned because, of course, of course, he was not going to listen.

“I asked you,” he huffed, every word an effort because splitting his attention between holding them steady and speaking was not a good idea. Not a good idea at all. “I asked you,” he started again, arms shuddering a little from exertion and fatigue, “not to talk.”

“I know,” Chirrut singsonged, and Baze could picture him perfectly, the grin on his face, the brightness seeping from his very form, skin glowing, eyes blind but illuminated, a star poised on his hands ready to take off and rejoin the universe beyond them.

Baze tightened his hands reflexively, to keep him, scared, as usual, that somehow he would flutter out of his grip, disappear into nothingness even though he was obviously right there, heavy, real, solid, a chunk of finely honed mass that Baze probably should not have agreed to do this with because he looked lithe, he looked slim, but he was muscled, bones laced with kyber, and probably too much for Baze. But he had asked. And Baze complied. It was his weakness, yet it was also his greatest strength.

“I’m going to kiss you.”

That sent a shiver throughout Baze’s entire form. He felt it from the top of his head to the points of his toes, but especially through his arms, and it made him clench his teeth together for a second because focus, steady. He would not let Chirrut fall like a vase to crash into a million pieces on the floor. Not that he would. Not that he ever would. Not Chirrut. He would simply roll and tumble and laugh like something glorious had happened. It didn’t matter, though. Baze was going to prove that he could hold him as long as he needed to, that he was safe, that he was careful with precious objects.

“Please,” he ground out once he had regained his equilibrium. “Stop. Talking.”

There was the sound of Chirrut clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth, and Baze knew he was tilting his head just so, sighing, ever wanting attention, which he got in spades because Baze was unable to stop himself from giving it constantly. “I can’t. I’ve gotten awfully bored. I was quiet a very long time. You should reward me.”

Had they been on the ground, had Baze’s feet been planted, had he been steady and not holding his partner’s weight up, this would have been the moment he would have sighed and slipped an arm around his shoulders or hip checked him or grabbed him by the back of his neck to shake him playfully before pulling him into slow kisses that would have quickly turned frenzied and needy. Had this occurred at any other time, Baze would have known how to handle the man he loved more than anything else that existed. For a split second, he considered letting him fall. “Mastery of the self,” he forced out, each word sharp and distinct.

“Is boring,” Chirrut added and then moved. 

There was a moment wherein Baze panicked, certain that he was at fault, that something terrible was happening until he realized that all that had occurred was that Chirrut had decided enough was enough. He felt the shift of the other’s body, the pressure as he put more weight on his arms for his next move, and then nothing. Baze opened his eyes in time to see him land, though he felt it in the floor and heard it more than anything, the slight strike of flesh against mat as Chirrut’s soles landed, soft, light, perfection poured into a vessel, starlight caught in bone and blood.

“Starlight?” Chirrut asked, giggling, and Baze cursed darkly because he had been speaking aloud again. 

The task finally completed, Baze allowed all of his aching, shaking limbs to collapse onto the floor, spread out, limp. He felt like everything inside his body had been scooped out, replaced with shifting sand that would not settle. How he was ever going to get off the floor and back to their room, he had no idea, but it didn’t matter much at the moment. Lying on his back watching Chirrut go through cool down stretches was more than good enough, it was everything he could have wanted. 

“Starlight,” he repeated, and Chirrut turned his head over his shoulder as though he was looking at him, as though he could see him, and Baze was certain he could in his Force way, in the only way that actually mattered. “I thought you were going to kiss me.”

And Chirrut laughed. Laughed like a bird calling as it soared through the air, wheeling circles in the sky. Laughed like the wind finding all the cracks in the temple and rushing through the hallways in the middle of the night. Laughed fit to fill Baze’s entire being up with it to overflowing with love yet there never seemed to be a breaking point, he always had room for more. He always wanted to have room for more.

Still laughing, though smaller, huffs of amusement now, Chirrut plopped onto his belly, face near Baze’s head, eyes a little to the left but close enough, and Baze just took in the sight of him, glowing, flushed from exertion. “I don’t know. I don’t think that would fall in line with mastery of the self. It seems like it would be better if I mastered myself against kissing you.”

“Shut up,” Baze said, reaching a hand out to catch him behind the neck, pulling him closer until their lips met, until Baze could sigh everything of himself into Chirrut’s mouth and feel Chirrut do the same. It would never matter what Chirrut asked, no matter how silly or insane it sounded, Baze would do it. Always.


	12. Skeleton Keys

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Drabble written to accompany this [slightly nsfw image](http://naniiebimworks.tumblr.com/post/165038211568/old-guardians) by Nan.

Life is hard, Chirrut knows, has been made harder by circumstances that are beyond his ability to mend though he would if he could. For Baze’s sake especially. Baze who takes everything to heart, who has wrapped himself up in many shells to deal with the world, to keep it from eating away at him quite as fast as it would otherwise. 

(Still, though, it gnaws, hungry, wanting, little by little, taking pieces in the night that Chirrut would prefer to never see go and feels helpless to stop. He fears waking one day to find a stranger, a ravaged heart with a cannon on its back and armor on its front with a face that would feel beloved to him if not for all the ways in which it has been changed, pulled, twisted out of shape. He worries that one night he will reach for Baze’s glittering, smoldering star in the sky of his Force-sense, and it will no longer be there, just a hole, imploded under its own weight, gone forever.)

There are many things that Chirrut can survive. He has proven that time and time again during his life. A challenge arises, and Chirrut faces it down, beats it, throws it into the dust and the dirt, puts his foot on its chest and stands, grinning, triumphant. How many difficulties has he bested this far? How many more does he have in him still? He would say that he that could fight forever so long as Baze is by his side, so long as Baze is near even though Baze’s faith in the Force has faded, grown brittle at the edges, thin in the middle from too much wear, such that one last gust of wind, one more blow will rend it to pieces, Baze’s faith in him, Baze’s love for him remains. This is all that Chirrut needs to go on. He knows it is wrong to sink so much into one person, one man, especially one whose shoulders bow from so much already, whose heart is clenched in pain and regret so often that he has taken to hiding in things that he would never have done before.

These actions make him no less Baze. 

Though Chirrut worries that one day he will slide so far into the depth of himself that he will not rise back to his own self, that one day he will slip too far away for even Chirrut to reach.

Then they will both be lost forever. 

He gives no voice to these fears because life is hard enough already without him adding to the burden of it. Chirrut swore that he would never be a burden. He is the stronger of them anyway, though those on the outside may never see it. To them, he is the blind man in the alley with his fortunes and his tales. He knows that he comes across as weak and slightly pathetic, no risk, nothing for anyone to concern themselves about. Baze, who lingers in the shadows, tall, broad as a door, unsmiling, hair in his face and a scowl on his lips, and a gun pointed at any who get too close looks like the danger. People too often do not look beyond what their eyes tell them, forget that the eyes can be deceptive. He is a master of deception, after all, good at spinning tales and making people believe what he wants them to. Baze is better at hiding himself, concocting a shell to protect him from the world around them, keep them at arm’s distance even if he has never actually been good at lying.

Chirrut is the knife hidden in the sleeve poised and ready to strike while Baze is the flash and the bang of the gun to destroy from a distance, never to see the face of what he is striking so that he doesn’t linger on it too much. (He lingers on it too much anyway, in the dark, in the night, when only Chirrut is there, and Chirrut would never tell, will never think any less of him, never could because it is the soft and gentle, kind and loving, endlessly aching part of him that Chirrut fell in love with in the first place.) 

It is easier to find Baze in the dark, in their shabby rented room when they are alone together. When Baze’s sighs echo the length of the day, and Chirrut can hear him hang his head low, low, as low as anything can seem to get, as dark and deep as the kyber tunnels under the temple, Chirrut can somehow always find him. With deft fingers clutching at skin and hair, tugging away all the layers built up on his body and around his heart. Baze has many locks, many doors, many shuttered windows, but Chirrut learned to pick each and every one of these years ago. His kisses are skeleton keys, and he will kiss, tongue greedily questing for the inside of Baze’s mouth until the latches fall away and Baze gives in utterly, desperately. 

They wrap around each other, and Chirrut will push off everything that the world has given to Baze, one burden, one sorrow after another, all the things that most people leave in the dirt and move on from but that Baze builds his life from, weaves into a hair shirt the like that would take his skin off if Chirrut didn’t cut it away every now and again. He will kiss and touch and pull breathy moans from Baze’s lips until they are nothing other than two men blossoming into love again like moonflowers blooming in the night, opening up to each other almost as if it is their first time. 

These are the moments that make everything else worthwhile, that make all the hardness of the universe bearable, when Chirrut can slip his hand inside his husband’s clothing, clutch at his hot, scarred skin and feel all of his softness remaining, straining, the glow and the pulse of his light so bright in his head that it is intoxicating. 

He will never get enough of this. There will never be enough of this. It is worth every hardship, every fight, even those he cannot win because they are too big for him. Though he will not stop facing them. For Baze’s sake as much as his own.


	13. Utterance

“I love you,” Baze says, words soft, the smallest whisper in the wide, wide galaxy, a tiny bird with wings flapping in a maelstrom. “I love you,” he says, barely able to wrap his mouth around the shape of the truth, but he is only whispering it into the edge of the desert, practicing for the real moment, which he thinks may never come, especially if he can only manage them, shaky and small, barely there at all, even when he is alone, even when he is only considering the possibility.

Baze Malbus has never learned how to be brave for the sake of himself. For others, yes, but not for himself. As a child, it was always him standing up for anyone who was bullied yet never saying a word to defend himself when the taunts were turned his way about his ears or his smile or his size. He could never find the words swimming through his own head to refute theirs so he let it go. Better to put that aside, leave his stored up resources of courage for other, better things. Guardians of the temple of the Whills give. Guardians of the temple of the Whills protect. Guardians of the temple of the Whills are selfless.

“But not to a fault,” Chirrut had said one day after Baze had mumbled those same words to him when he asked why he did nothing, said nothing to anyone who hurt his feelings. “Not to the detriment of one’s self. That’s not what they mean.” And Chirrut had looked so serious about it, an odd and somewhat disquieting face smeared across the young man who was normally the very definition of jovial. He had, in that moment, looked as lovely as anyone in the entire world, lovelier than all the kyber, prettier than any piece of art inside the temple walls that had been made by a member of the Whills or a supplicant or just brought to the temple for safekeeping.

Baze had long known that his friend was attractive, but he had never seen how beautiful he was, truly, until that moment. How radiant, how glowing. With his face soft, and his voice low, and everything that he was turned toward Baze to comfort him but also to spurn him toward something else, some truth that Baze himself had never learned: that it was okay to allow himself a modicum of the care he imparted to others.

“I love you,” he says again, rolls it around on his tongue like a piece of candied ginger fresh from the market stalls, sweet but harsh underneath, layer upon layer of flavor. From where he is sitting on the roof of one of the temple structures all he can see is the star-spattered sky and the reach of the desert beyond the mesa. They both flow on and on forever, endlessly reaching towards each other but potentially never meeting like the hands of lovers stretched out, drowning, each one unable to save the other but unwilling to let them go alone at the same time. He has no stomach for sitting on the edge of the wall or walking it the way that Chirrut will, as though he is suspending his life by a string, grinning, repeating, “Trust in the Force, Baze,” all the while as he performs every acrobatic move he can think of on the sunbaked bricks, trusting in so many things to keep him safe while daring all of them to betray him that it makes Baze’s head spin.

“What do you believe in?”

“The Force.”

“What do you trust?”

“The Force.”

“What is the guiding truth of the universe?”

“The Force.”

No one comments on the way that Baze’s voice shakes when he answers, the slight, apparent hesitation about the Force. He means it in the way he means everything with worry under it, with concern. Yes, the Force is there, but that does not mean that only good things happen. Bad things happen while the Force is there, too. People die. People are hurt. His family died. In the sand. In the wastes. From sickness. And they believed in the Force. His family died, but he did not. Yet he could not save them, either. All he could do was take what meager possessions were left after he had buried them under the shifting sands– near the patch of skeleton trees that he sometimes thinks he sees in the distance from the roof of the temple but knows this is not true because he walked too far, crossed too much of Jedha to be able to see them from here and it has been years so the trees are probably gone now–and walk until he reached the city, until he reached the temple, until a door opened, until a life yielded itself to him or he yielded to it, Baze is sometimes not sure which came first.

(He yielded. He always yields.)

He trusts in the Force like sand under his feet, always shifting, always dangerous. You learn to walk on it because you have to. You learn to live with it because you have to. Sometimes he thinks he does not love it. Does not love it the way that he should, the way that Chirrut loves it. Chirrut loves it solidly, believes in it, trusts in it like it is solid underneath him, like it is a net, like he can rush off the edge of the temple roof, off the edge of the mesa into the air, fling himself far and wide and the Force will catch him like it is a Jedi levitating something. Chirrut loves the Force so much it brings light into his eyes.

The only thing that Baze loves the way that Chirrut loves the Force is Chirrut.

Chirrut says, “Trust in the Force,” and Baze hears, “Trust in me.” It is easier to trust in Chirrut. It is easier to trust in someone he can see and hear and touch, someone who will clasp a hand in his when the nights are bad and the dreams come, rife with skeletons, the trees, his family, all the other people in the sand, in the universe, full of burning. Baze closes his eyes sometimes and everything is burning, everyone is lost, he is burning, there are screams, there are tears. He will wake sobbing, unable to breathe, unable to speak, unable to do anything but sit and shudder and make words with his fingers while Chirrut gathers around him, infinitely strong and sturdy despite the whiplike form of his body.

Baze will dream, and Baze will fall apart, and Baze will spell, “Death. Death. Stars,” into Chirrut’s hand, and all Chirrut will do is hold him until it recedes. Until Baze can thank him with speech instead of gestures, and then Chirrut will hold his face in his hands and kiss him gently and in a progression that is familiar: cheek, forehead, cheek, lips, lips, lips.

Baze Malbus has done nothing to deserve this he knows. He has managed nothing great or spectacular. He cups faith in his hands only so that it runs out like water (or sand) from the spaces between his fingers. He cannot build a cup to hold it in. He has no vessel save his own body, which is fractured, splintered, cracked, holds nothing firm but one thing.

“I love you,” he whispers into the wind again, tries to see the words whipped into the sand as though they were petals or ribbons, twining, bumbling, floating through the air. “I love you,” he tries again, more forcefully, more consistent, solid, like the hand that curls around his shoulder, like the one that sneaks into his hair to cup the back of his neck.

And Baze shuts his eyes as Chirrut slides close because this is not how he meant it to go and he is embarrassed, ashamed to be caught out, practicing at his confession, the most important confession of all. He means to say, “I’m sorry,” but his throat is closed the way it gets sometimes, and his hands are not cooperating either. And his lap is full of Chirrut who smells like life and kyber. I love you, he thinks, hard, as hard as anything he has ever thought, feels it resonate in his bones, shiver the webs of the Force spun around them like a bug trapped by a spider, thrashing. 

“I know,” Chirrut says, gentle, kind, the way Baze has always wanted the Force to be. “I know,” he says again, and then there are the kisses. Cheek, forehead, cheek, lips, lips, lips.


	14. Dirges

That night–at least Chirrut thinks that it is night, would have been night on Jedha, goes by the internal clock that has rested in his bones since the moment he was born, long before the steady sweep of time took his eyes and he could no longer see the stars or the sun or Baze’s hair in his face, which is where it always was especially when they were young and he was shy. He thinks that it is night, but he has no way of knowing when they are universe stretched, loaded onto a ship and adrift in the sky, no land under his feet, no haunting pulses of kyber to steady him and guide him. The Empire took most of the kyber, but they left the echo, the small bits, the little seams that were deemed unworthy, took too much time to mine. Who has use for flecks of kyber but the Force-sensitive blind man who uses them to navigate by and his cannon toting husband whose guilt they fuel? 

And now they are here in the sky, in the black, in the star-studded darkness that Chirrut always gazed at when they were young while Baze swept a hand above them, recited the odes and the names and the stories and star charts, one after another, the same way in which he would repeat the mantras, the same way that he would say Chirrut’s name, with love, with reverence. They are hung in it. He knows that they are moving, but it does not feel like it because the only kyber that he feels are the ones he knows–the bit in his staff, the small piece Baze wears sequestered under so many layers of armor, bright again his skin, like a brand, like a torch, like a hairshirt (”how many ways will you torture yourself?” “until there is penance. until I am done.”)–and the new piece that Jyn wears, the one that keens like something utterly broken at the heart.

Chirrut knows things with broken hearts, but this one he has no time to mend. Not right now. Not when Jedha is burned, razed, gone. Even when they toppled the temple, he believed that Jedha itself would remain. The city, the life, the kyber in the ground, the statues in the sand, the ones that he and Baze visited when they were young, simple, bright, hopeful initiates, hand in hand under the shadows of the Jedi statues, enraptured as though on the holiest of holy ground. Baze’s face in his hands, and Baze’s eyes dark and wet, overwhelmed, always overwhelmed by feelings, his own and those of everyone, everything around him. Force sensitive does not always look the same on people. Sometimes it is something else. It is luck. It is the ability to fly through things no one can fly through. It is walking by listening to kyber. It is a heart too big, too deep, too full, and eyes wet like the oceans Chirrut never saw, never needed to see because he could submerge himself in his own private sea everyday, everyday. 

That night, if it is night, Baze sings. He weeps and sings, low, low. A throaty rumble, a deep chest sound that is like Jedha herself moving through him. He sings the songs that may possibly never be heard again. They are among strangers but the brand of new grief, new disaster, is too much, and they have stopped caring about who sees so Chirrut is tucked against Baze’s chest, head against his shoulder, and they are twined together like trees planted too close, leaning on each other forevermore, grown together, inextricably linked. Baze sings, and Chirrut touches his face, and it is wet from the oceans in his eyes spilling over. Baze weeps for them both now. Chirrut has not cried since the temple burned around them. Chirrut is only hot hot anger that runs like bright kyber through him because Baze feels the emptiness of the universe, mourns for it, while Chirrut only wants to avenge it. 

People on the outside have no idea what they are, have become, used to be. They are master craftsmen when it comes to tricks and facades. Chirrut has a smile like a knife, and Baze has a scowl like fifteen walls. He thought no one would hurt them again. He was wrong. He was wrong. He was wrong. And they will pay for it. The Empire will pay for it. 

But tonight–if it is night, and it is night, the night of the soul, the last night of Jedha–he will listen while his husband sings all the songs of Jedha, all the songs of the temple, all the songs of the kyber and the stars, until he cannot sing anymore, until his oceans have run dry, until it is time for the next step. Chirrut will trace his hands over Baze’s face and press them against his chest, slip his fingers under all those walls until he can reach the kyber, reach the skin, burned and blistered and ruined from the heat of the crystal (”why do you do this to yourself?” “someone has to.”) to rub ointment on it and soothe it for a little while because that is he what he does, he tends all the things that Baze cannot, which is himself, which has always been himself.

And then they will war. And then they will war for everything that has been lost, for everything that will never be again, blinked out of existence in less time than their first kiss lasted. 

But tonight there are only dirges.


	15. Recollections

There are hundreds of good days, that’s the thing that’s easy to forget, though it shouldn’t be, not really. The mind tracks the bad, especially Baze’s mind, holds the worst moments up to the light again and again to remind him of what has happened, of what he cannot allow to happen again, of what he should have prevented, of what he was too slow, too dense, too distracted to stop. These are the things it plays on repeat, an endless show comprised of the worst memories it can find. 

But there are hundreds of good days. 

Baze’s mind refuses to linger on them, refuses to settle, skips off them like a stone thrown across the pond they used to have in the temple gardens, the one stocked with fish and lilies an off-world pilgrim had brought as an offering to the Force because he knew that Jedha had nothing like it. Baze’s mind has never settled easily on the good when the world around him is in disarray. 

Chirrut’s mind is better with them. In the dark, dark of their rented rooms, when the wind shakes the building and they are huddled together, wrapped around each other skin to skin for comfort as much as for warmth, Chirrut will whisper the good days back to Baze with each press of his lips, each touch of his hand across scarred and weathered flesh. He remembers when the only marks on Baze were the tiny cuts across his fingertips from all his work in the archives and with the kyber, or the occasional kitchen accident when someone else was being careless. He remembers. He breathes these moments back to life against Baze’s skin and collects the moans that they stir, each content and satisfied rumble, into his mouth so that they can pass them back and forth until they are both high and dizzy on them.

“Do you remember the lantern festival the year we were twenty?” He just past the mark, and Baze not yet twenty-one. Chirrut has always loved the months when they are the same age the most for some reason he can give no name to. It is the only thing he can never best Baze at–Baze who has no sense of competition at all except with himself, who lives for the benefit of others, to benefit others, who has never cared whether he was smarter or stronger than anything else except when it has helped him save someone, Baze who takes all of his own failures as the failures of the universe, as failures so large that they are as a great as the statues in the sand and does not see that he is only human, he is only him, he is made lovely and his failures are only so great in his own eyes–being older. No matter how hard Chirrut tries he will never be older than Baze. (Unless Baze dies first and freezes his age forever. Unless Chirrut is made to continue on without this fragile bird heart cupped in his hands to warm and praise and tend. Chirrut has always liked to win, but he would not want to win that way. No one would win that. Everyone, everything would lose. He would burn the galaxy down until the wrong was righted, until he and Baze were reunited in the Force, forever.)

Baze, bone limp, reduced to something much smaller in their bed, shakes his head where it rests against Chirrut’s shoulder. He clings to him like a vine to a house, warm, pliant, flexible, more flexible than a man who carries a cannon on his back all day every day should be, but Baze has always had six faces in jars for different reasons, an ever-changing show of who he thinks he should be, who he needs to be at the moment. The face for Chirrut is none of these at all. It is tear-stained and red-eyed and downturned lips and every scar and every piece of vulnerability because Baze trusts him. On some days, this means more to Chirrut than Baze’s love. Baze’s love is infinite and it is great; it is a blanket that he spreads across the entire galaxy even if he means to look like he does not. Baze loves everything. And while Chirrut knows that the love he gives him is different than the love he gives the rest of forever, it still sometimes grates on him that Baze stretches himself so thin for beings who do not, will not ever know his name. But his trust. That is something rarely given. His true face, his shy secrets, his warring doubts in the middle of the night when he hears the Force, feels the Force, knows the Force but has to sit and push it back with his hands because, no, because it disappointed him too much, because it hurt him too much, because he cannot stand under its weight anymore, that is the Baze that only Chirrut sees. Baze cannot profess to give love to only him alone, and Chirrut would not want it that way anyway, but he does give all of himself to only Chirrut alone, and that is everything. 

Baze is a garden full of flowers that have been exposed to harsh conditions, acidic rain and frost and fire. They are burned and scorched, their leaves tattered, their petals shaken off to scatter across the ground. The ground itself salted so that nothing should grow. Baze is a garden that once bloomed full and bright, one that Chirrut could lie in for hours and wonder at the perfection of the universe that it created such a man. Now Baze has no stomach for gardening, has locked it away behind a wall because the winds turned cold and the buds fell off. Chirrut tends it because he needs it as much as Baze does. Chirrut tends it because he can not stop, will never stop. They swore to honor and protect and love each other. Chirrut wishes he had changed Baze’s vows, inserted something about honoring and protecting and loving oneself in there as well, but he knows Baze. Even before everything burned around them, in their eyes, Baze’s voice would have tripped over selfish words like that. He has never had the stomach to be anything but self-sacrificing whether that means he sheds his own blood or forgets his garden for the sake of others.

(”You cannot save the universe, my love. You cannot save us all.”

“Who else will do it?”

Chirrut knows before he says it that it will do no good, but says it anyway. “The Force.”

He cannot see Baze’s face, cannot see anything anymore, but does not need to because he knows what it looks like, profound disappointment, decades of loss. “It has proven that it will not do its job so I will.”

People have always said that it is Chirrut who never loses an argument, but this is not true because Chirrut has never been able to convince Baze that he is worth more than the smallest pebble in the streets, that it is not his duty to lay his life on the line for the protection of anyone, of everyone from what he perceives as evil, as a threat. Chirrut has asked Baze to be selfish for his sake before, and it left his husband a ruined, aching mess so he never asks it of him again. 

He does not know how long the Force will let him keep its martyr until it calls him back. He does not intend to be left standing alone when it does.)

Now he kisses the skin that he can reach, sucks hard enough to leave marks that will never show under all the layers that Baze wears every day while Baze shudders and squirms against him, hands ghosting over his skin like it is glass, like it is porcelain, always so soft and gentle no matter how many times Chirrut has prodded him, whispered, “Harder. Tighter,” into his ear. Baze never hears it, touches everything like he is made of granite and the rest of the universe is as gentle as a butterfly’s wing. (It is the other way around, of course. Baze is silk, thin, thin, see through when held up to the light, torn when handled the wrong way. He always handles himself in the wrong way.)

“There were flower wreaths,” Chirrut says into his mouth, whispers the words into the cavern that exists between Baze’s lips, tries to fill it up with light, with all the good memories. Baze twitches at that contact, hard against his hip, fingers just a bit tighter on his waist, and Chirrut likes that. “I put flowers in your hair.” Their kiss is not yet a kiss, but he can tell the way that Baze’s muscle’s strain that he is waiting for him to conquer his mouth. Baze is infinitely patient even when he wants. “You were glorious. You were mine.”

“Am yours,” Baze breathes, and Chirrut feels the way his heart hammers beneath his skin, so fast he thinks it might burst. (From joy this time. From pleasure. Not from the heavy, hard sadness of the world.) “Always will be yours.”

“I had never seen anyone more beautiful.” Chirrut keeps a hand tangled in Baze’s hair so that he will not do what he does when heaped with praise, turn his head away as though to let it slide and slip into the night, to be blown away on the wind. He keeps his lips where they are, pressed so close to Baze’s mouth that he knows the truths he utters must slip into him, make new homes there, water the flowers in the garden he longs to escape into.

“Do you remember the lantern festival?” he asks again because sometimes all Baze needs is a nudge, a reminder, a glimpse and then his mind will pull the curtains back and let him see the light. There is so much light still even if he will not see it because he is always facing the dark, trying so hard to keep it away from everyone else.

Baze stutters a keening, pleased cry into his mouth when Chirrut wraps his fingers solidly around his length. It takes a moment before he answers. “Your robes were blue. You put blue flowers in my hair to match them. So everyone would know we were together.”

Chirrut has always performed for other people but never when it came to their love. “No.” Baze’s hands on his waist tighten, pull him closer, but Chirrut does not relent, will not take his mouth yet, not until he has unleashed all the light he can. “For you. So you would know.”

When he presses their lips together, tongue in Baze’s mouth, he can taste the petals, he can feel the stars burning. Chirrut has never loved the universe or the Force the way that Baze does. Chirrut loves the way the Force moves through people. He loves the way the Force moves through Baze most of all even if that means he sometimes has to provide the light, feed the good memories back into him. There are hundreds of good memories. 

That night they make a new one.


	16. Mango, Ginger

The sun is high, and the wind is still, a combination that makes it a slightly warmer than usual day on Jedha, and they are stretched out on one of the balconies that dot the outside of the temple, high up, in the areas where few people go because the only things in the higher levels are the archives and the storage rooms and all manner of dusty, dry things. (”And spirits,” Chirrut tells the younglings to keep them away, “Force spirits who will whisper and prattle on, lecture you in the ways of the universe. It will be all lessons. Only lessons. Forever and ever.” Baze has chided him for this sort of talk because it is not true, and it is selfish of Chirrut to want to keep things for them alone, but he finds that he can never be truly sincere because he likes knowing that they will not be bothered either. He likes the moments when they can just be themselves. Not Guardians. Not teachers. Just two men high up on a balcony, hands threaded, in love.)

Chirrut has thrown an arm over his face to block his eyes from the sun, and Baze takes the opportunity to stare at him, to follow the line of his jaw and the curve of his cheekbone, the angles he can see, and the slight pink that the sun pulls to his golden skin. There is something delicate and lovely about Chirrut. Like a finely chiseled statue, like a painting, like a poem. He looks like art. He looks the way that mango ginger ices taste on the rare occasions when they have the proper ingredients in the kitchen to make them. (Baze will always associate them with Chirrut because the first time they kissed, Baze blushing and stumbling along in his words while he tried to tell Chirrut that the way his heart quickened when he saw him, the way his breath caught and shuddered, the way his body yearned, stretched, pulled toward him like a moon caught in a sun’s gravity, did not feel the way that a friend felt about a friend, Chirrut’s mouth was full of the sweet. And how Chirrut’s eyes had gleamed and shone, the way that color had risen high on his cheeks, and how he had swallowed the ice quickly before catching a hand in the collar of Baze’s robe to tug him forward, fast and with all of his strength, such that Baze was caught off guard, such that a gasp was pulled from him even as Chirrut’s lips pressed into his, even as Chirrut opened his mouth, tongue pressing to Baze’s in encouragement, and then there was the taste of mango ginger ice everywhere and Chirrut’s tongue, and it was sloppy and uncoordinated, but still one of the best things to ever happen in his life, still one of the best memories.)

Chirrut is himself a lot like mango ginger ices. Sweet and crisp, a clear taste, a lovely one but with a slight burn underneath, unexpected spice and fire beneath everything else. A surprise lurking but not an unpleasant one. Even when he is a menace, a nuisance, running wild, robes flapping, staff cracking along on the ground every few steps, voice high, ripped higher by the wind, dancing along on the currents above the city, the very fact that Chirrut exists is enough to warm Baze’s heart through and through, enough to make him grateful.

Baze tries to be grateful for everything, but it can be difficult. The universe is hard, and it makes this fact known to him often. The sand wastes with their scrub trees and dune pirates and long stretches of nothing took his family when he was young, almost took him, threatened to pull him down into sucking holes, the yawning, gaping mouth of the moon that wanted to devour him, turn him into kyber crystals glittering in the hidden caves with their rushing water and strange, undulating worms. The sands would have taken him too if it weren’t for Chirrut. (And the temple, he supposes, because it was a temple organized trip, but only Chirrut saw him, only Chirrut heard him. “A flickering, dying star in the expanse of the Force,” Chirrut said once, touching his face after Baze had woken, covered in sweat, almost screaming, from a nightmare in which no one reached him in time, in which he was pulled down, down, down forever and lived through everything that Jedha would give him. Celestial bodies are not always kind.)

The temple took him in, the way the Whills welcomes everything, everyone. The way that Chirrut took him in was different, as though he had always known him, as though there was no way they could be anything but together. That first day, Chirrut threaded their hands together, and it felt like they had always been that way, holding onto each other in the dark, finding strength in each other even when one was weak. They became fast, best friends, and then something more, and then everything. 

The universe is hard, but Chirrut is not even if he is so proficient with every weapon in the Whills that the older masters come to him for advice. His words are just as sharp as daggers when they need to be, unleashed from a mind that knows too much, sees too much, and holds itself a little bit away from others in order to make it through each day. Chirrut is metal at the edges, honed down to a knifepoint, angry inside like a swirling star, like too much ginger on the tip of the tongue. He has battled demons, faced them down in the darkness of their room when all Baze can do is reach his hands out or cover his face or cry. For the pulses of pain that radiate through him, long stabs of phantom misery from the Force.

The Force is everywhere. It runs like a river through the universe. It is a great ocean on which the entire universe bobs like tiny paper boats that have carefully been folded and then set down to float and crash and sink. Baze feels everything, everyone that sinks, their slow departure from the grid of life, the way it winks, blinks, fades out, their last cries, their pain. It lances through him when his guard is down, it pierces his heart, it buries itself inside his mind, burrows like sandworms. Too much time in the desert, too much time spent wandering through the wastes of Jedha, too much time eating the sparse vegetation that grows there, every bit of it laced with kyber from the ground, too many kyber worms ingested, harvested from caverns when there was nothing else growing to eat. Baze has practically become kyber according to the temple masters, though he scarcely believes them, would not hear anything about it, except that Chirrut says it too.

(”Your heart is kyber,” Chirrut says, head on his chest, when their room is dark, and they are just naked bodies tangled together, dotted with sweat after a union. “Your heart is kyber. I can hear it singing. I heard it singing when we found you. I saw you glowing. If the world was dark, I could find you. I could find you anywhere.”

“You’re silly. You’re impossible,” Baze says, argues, flushes. Chirrut speaks like he is the wonderful one, like he is the special one, like he is something glorious, and it is not true. Not to anyone but Chirrut, though this is fine. Baze would rather be special to Chirrut than to anyone else in the whole universe.

“All the pain of the Force flows into you.”

Baze is silent, still, his hand on Chirrut’s head, a caress. This is a truth he cannot deny so there is no point in trying.

“You’re strong, Baze. You’re strong enough for it, and you love enough for it.”

Baze sometimes feels like an overflowing cup, too much expected of him, too much liquid, and he cannot hold it all so it spills and seeps and floods everything around him, floods him. It makes him weak. It makes him less. 

“It makes you beautiful. Your heart is kyber.” Chirrut places a kiss on his chest, over his heart, and then moves to hold Baze’s face in his hands. “I will guard you all my days.” Chirrut never runs out of words. They flow from his mouth like he is a neverending fountain whereas Baze sometimes feels like he has to pry every one of his out from a locked box with no key, fished out with twine through the unless keyhole.

“I love you,” Baze says because it is true, and because it is the thing that rises, like incandescent bubbles, when he opens his mouth.

And Chirrut just kisses him, deep, questing, all tongue and panting, shuddering breath as though he is trying to swallow those words into himself. He does not need to try so hard. Baze would give him all his words, his voice, his tongue, his heart, kyber or not, his mind, dull or not, if he asked, if he just asked.)

Chirrut lifts his arm from his face, and looks over, catches Baze’s ardent, persistent stare, and smirks the way he always smirks when he discovers Baze in these acts of worship. (”They are worship,” Chirrut confided in him the first time they gave in to deeper desire, and Baze worried that they had blasphemed against the Whills, against their vows, against the Force itself. “This,” Chirrut had laid a hand against his face, touched his lips, skated down his body, fingers lingering and exploring while Baze sighed and shifted and wanted, “this is worship. We are in the Force. We are of the Force. This is not blasphemy.”) Chirrut smirks at him and rolls onto his side so that he can look at him better, one arm tucked under his head, and the other reaching out to brush through Baze’s tangled waves to find his ear, trace the shell, pull on the lobe, and that in and of itself is enough to make him start to yearn. “You’re thinking pretty hard about something,” Chirrut teases, voice sweet, cloying, sticking in Baze’s ears and chest, tacky and slow, honey. Baze would lap at that fountain forever.

Baze normally answers with boldfaced truth, especially when caught. Normally he would answer that sort of statement by just saying, “You,” but he is sun-warmed and lazy, desire pooling in his groin, want flooding through his veins in a rush. “Mango ginger ices,” he answers, as coy as he can ever be. (”You’re a terrible flirt,” Chirrut accused him once, and Baze was stricken, thought the other meant he was coming on to people left and right, but Chirrut chuckled at the look on his face and slid closer, side to side, pressed together. “No. I meant you’re awful at it.” But Chirrut had kissed him then anyway, in the shadow of a doorway in a corridor seldom used. And Chirrut had moaned low and gorgeous in his ear when Baze sucked at the skin of his throat, slipped a hand under Chirrut’s robes to press his hand, hot, splay it over that toned abdomen.)

“Ah,” Chirrut says, one eyebrow quirking up, up almost to his close-shaved hairline. Baze loves to brush his fingers over the fuzz, feel the way that Chirrut relaxes into him like a pleased loth cat and practically purs from the motion. Likes it best when Chirrut is in his lap while he does it, arches into him again and again and again. They do not always need grand gestures to fulfill the other. Sometimes it is the smallest things that get the best reaction. Chirrut slides closer, and Baze turns onto his side to mimic him, and for better access. “Are you always thinking of me?”

“There is so much to consider,” Baze answers, pleased with himself for not stumbling, for not mumbling through something half-formed and inane. Not that Chirrut would care. Chirrut never cares. Chirrut seems to like the fumbling, enjoys pulling Baze to the brink when all he can do is stammer through almost words and sigh Chirrut’s name over and over and over until there is nothing else in his throat, no taste other than those letters, and his spark. 

Chirrut’s hand on his side slides down to cup greedily at his ass, one of Chirrut’s favorite places to lay his hand. “It’s a lovely day for worship,” he says before slotting their lips together, and Baze explores his mouth with his tongue, looking for that fountain where all the words grow but all he finds is something that reminds him of mango, ginger.

Chirrut is right; it is a lovely day for worship.


	17. Shape of You

Chirrut has always been tactile, always demonstrably affectionate with touches, caresses, fingers on Baze’s waist or elbow, a hand on the back of his neck, an arm around his shoulders. Even before that first world-changing, universe shattering kiss, his touches lingered, gentle and warm but steady, insistent, much like the humming of the kyber in the caves under the temple. I am here. I am here. I am here, they seemed to whisper, and Baze, who never learned to ask for anything, whose very presence in the halls seemed to give people the impression that he was a wall, aloof, alone, mean, would just relax into it because Chirrut was the only one who touched him outside of sparring, Chirrut was the only one who didn’t seem to think he was made of serrated rock ready to slash to ribbons anything that came in contact with him.

After the kiss, itself some catastrophic event, the beginning of a new era, a new way of telling time, a falling, a freeing, the touching was nothing new, simply more brazen, bolder. Caresses and strokes, tickling and teasing, everything done with reverence much like sitting on the floor knee to knee praying in time with each other.

At night, in bed, arms and legs tangled, Chirrut’s fingers tracing his features even when he had slipped into something close to sleep, constant, constant, like his love, like the Force.

“Your hands are always on me,” Baze joked once, half serious, half embarrassed, always smitten.

“I like the shape of you,” was Chirrut’s answer, and then he chased away any further questions with a kiss–light, lingering–followed by another–deep and dark as any cavern–such that those were all Baze could consider.

The touches change when his sight leaves him, his eyes betraying him at last. He goes days without reaching for Baze, hands clenched around his cane white-knuckled as though he means to break it in half. Perhaps he does. When Baze touches, Chirrut flinches back, away, turns his back, turns his head, and Baze doesn’t know what to do, what to give him other than patience and time and love. Love as unyielding as the Force.

Little by little, he returns. Small touches in the hall, hand on elbow, fingers on his shoulder, and Baze allows them all. At night in their bed, Chirrut is a wall of cool, soft skin that does not reach across the gulf even when Baze tries, in small gestures to reach him.

Fleeting, friendly touches during the day and nights bereft of warmth leave a strange taste in Baze’s mouth, darken his moods with concern that he does not voice, worried that the words will be stained with pity when he speaks them and then he will shame both of them. Chirrut keeps holding the cane like he means to break it, like that will solve everything around them, all the pain, all the heartache.

Words in the middle of the night. “I miss you.” Chirrut’s voice is a ghost.

Baze’s fingers stretched across the mattress, close enough that he can feel the heat off Chirrut’s skin. “I’m here.” Jump the gulf and find me. But Chirrut does not leap anymore, just blunders his way through forever darkened hallways, cursing under his breath, radiating anger.

“I’ll hurt you.” There is too much ire in him. It covers him like a blanket of starfire, and he knows that Baze has always been afraid of flames since his village was consumed.

Baze would walk across fire for him. Baze would walk into the heart of a star. Baze would ignite himself to keep him warm if needed. When his fingers touch skin, Chirrut sighs, shuddering, as though he has been holding his breath for weeks. When Baze pulls him close, he stiffens, tension throughout his body until Baze kisses him lightly and then deep and dark like a cavern. “The shape of me misses the shape of you. You can never hurt me.”

When Chirrut weeps, Baze smoothes away every tear and kisses the marks in his palms, crescent-shaped, from holding the cane too tight.


	18. Sing Me Home

Baze sings. Most of the time he sings, absentmindedly, when he is doing something else, whether that be making tea or cooking or doing the laundry or cleaning his weapons. Repetitive motions, old habits that are emblazoned into his body, all the things tied into muscle memory and years spent in the temple, years in the garden tending growing things under the blazing sun, nights spent washing dishes or cooking in the kitchens, peel back the layers of the man that he has become to reveal the man he used to be, the man in initiate robes with dark, wavy hair soft about his face while he sang. There was never a chore in the entire temple that Baze got through without singing. Once Chirrut’s eyesight failed, faltered, flickered out like the lights in the oldest parts of the temple where the wiring was bad and a sharp wind would send them all careening into darkness, he trusted the telltale, solid weight of Baze’s voice more than the echoing clicks of the tongue, more than his staff, more than the echo box that they cobbled together and fixed so many times that it was impossible to tell what it had been when it was made from what it became. Baze, unlike those other things did occasionally, never let him down.

Baze has never let him down. Despite what he thinks. Despite the doubt that he has curled up like a scroll to place in the recesses of his heart that he unfurls entirely too often, Chirrut has never felt that Baze has failed him. If anything, Chirrut feels as if he is the one who is the failure. He is the one who was unable to keep the torch of Baze’s faith burning. He was the one who watched it gutter itself out under sadness and heartache and so much pain that he thinks he can never brush it all away. It is like sand over every part of him. When Chirrut clears one area, the wind blows and covers him all over again. Sand and sadness the color and weight of Jedha itself.

This is why Chirrut strives to make him laugh. This is why they banter quick and light and always in the middle of the streets, in the middle of fights, when they are locked in cells, when Baze–gentle, kind, unerringly loving Baze–brings Stormtroopers down one after the other with his canon determined not to think about how there is, was, a beating heart under all the armor. For a laugh and a steady accompanying hand, Chirrut will gladly walk into all the walls in the city. Baze will always follow after, a scowl, a shadow, almost afraid of the sun, but his hand will find Chirrut’s shoulder, his arm, the small of his back, and he will guide him away from the dangers that he cannot drop before he reaches them. 

And when they are alone, when the sun has slipped away, when it is just them in their rooms, and Chirrut is quiet, pretending to meditate, when Baze is busying himself with whatever small little chores need to be done, when his body slips into a well-worn habit, repeating motions it learned in the faraway patches of time, in a life that no longer exists anymore, Baze will sing. Baze will sing softly and sweetly, a low, reverberating sound that nestles into Chirrut’s heart and threatens to shake him apart. Baze sings the songs of the temple. Baze sings the song of Jedha. 

Baze sings them home again.


	19. The Dare

Chirrut accepts a dare from his classmates to kiss the rough, gruff, older, golden boy initiate named Baze Malbus who keeps to himself and haunts the archives (everyone is lowkey convinced he’s some sort of cryptid and hates people; he’s just shy, of course.)

Chirrut does. With pride. And gets a good look at him, at his eyes, which are kind and soft and loving. Chirrut, of course, is now all, “oh no. oh fuck.” because he’s gone. This is it. He just knows.

Baze just sort of smiles, soft, small, too small for any of Chirrut’s classmates to see.

Chirrut starts goading his classmates to come up with more elaborate dares for him that all involve Baze: aka write him a love letter, kiss him again, get him to dance, get him to TALK, ask him about his favorite book in the archives, best him at sparring. 

Chirrut lowkey utilizes his classmates’ fascination with Baze to effectively woo him.

One night Chirrut shows up at Baze’s door, and it’s cold on Jedha so he’s shivering in just his nightclothes. Baze opens the door, wavy hair pulled up in a bun, looking soft, looking relaxed, and it takes his breath away for thirty whole seconds while he just stares, and Baze is somewhat uncomfortable by now, shifting and feeling very vulnerable in only one layer instead of the many he is normally wearing because now it’s even more obvious how big he is. 

“They dared me to visit you,” Chirrut finally squeaks. (He’s been telling Baze the truth the entire time. “They dared me to do x.” “Oh.” “I thought it would be a good excuse to see you.” Because it was never about the dare. Not really. Not since that first time.)

“How long did they dare you to stay?” Baze asks, and his voice is this low rumble like thunder during the rainy season, and Chirrut would fall into it forever if he could.

And Chirrut shrugs because he’s actually lying this time. No one dared him to do anything. He just wanted to see Baze.

“How about forever?” Baze asks, cheeks flushed, not looking at him because he can’t, words basically mumbled to the floor.

And Chirrut tackles him into the room, covers him with kisses. Never leaves.

Years later when they exchange their marriage vows, Chirrut starts his out with, “So there was this dare…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am sometimes bad at figuring out what Tumblr drabbles deserve to be here so occasionally things get posted after long periods of existing there or by request. Forgive me.


	20. Inside Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sexual situations mentioned in this drabble. NSFW.

The temple around them is quiet, still, long sunk into the hours of the night that are supposed to be for rest, though Chirrut’s sleep schedules rarely align with those of everyone else, and Baze just has trouble sleeping because of the long, meandering river of worries in his mind that never seems to slow. The majority of the temple sleeps, except for the handful of night guardians watching the halls, standing post at the walls, starting the food for breakfast in the kitchens, and in their room, Baze and Chirrut occupy themselves in whatever way they can find, which is in doing something productive if Baze has any say in it. Chirrut’s methods are normally less altruistic. 

“What are you doing now?” 

“Weaving,” Baze answers without even turning his head to see what Chirrut is up to, his fingers picking through the threads practically on instinct alone at this point. The masters taught him weaving long ago when he small and nervous, an anxious ball of energy that couldn’t seem to settle. They gave his fingers a purpose, and while it does not always calm him, it is at least something productive.

“Why now?” Chirrut’s voice is pitched in the type of whine he used when they were children and no one wanted to play with him because he was always making up his own games or changing the rules of others to something strange and mysterious. His constant altering of the known made their peers uneasy in a way that they could not name so they simply started avoiding him, pretending that he wasn’t there, that they couldn’t hear him, that they couldn’t see him. Force cursed some of them used to taunt him, and Baze knows what they meant because he is in that realm himself even though he has always been more grounded, better at letting it alone when necessary. 

They are, the both of them, too close to it, too tuned to it, though in slightly different ways. And Chirrut is closer, just a bit, just a touch, but enough that Baze cannot quite stand where he stands, does not know what he knows, doesn’t want it, either. He already knows too much, feels too much. More would be unwelcome, an uninvited guest not just standing in the entryway but walking through all the rooms of a house, opening doors and drawers to quest inside of them for secrets. No, Baze is already more aware than he is comfortable being, and Chirrut is at least two steps further into it. He cannot imagine what that must be like. Sometimes he is surprised that Chirrut has any time for the world around them at all, wonders that he does not just sink into the Force fully, adrift on its waters, a visionary, an oracle, spouting prophecies all day while scribes write them down and try to interpret them. He could do that if he wanted. The Whills has been without a prophet for decades, and they would eagerly welcome another one, especially with the odd rumors that filter onto Jedha occasionally. About something dark on the horizon. 

Chirrut could easily become their oracle, but he has no interest in it. He likes the physical, solid reminders of life, he has said, never tires of saying, will make a list of all of the things that keep him grounded whenever Baze asks even though some of them are carnal enough to make Baze blush, but never Chirrut, whose tongue was built for talking. 

Baze thinks of this while he weaves, remembers a night much like this one, both of them still awake long after they should have retired, stretched out on the floor, hands twined together, looking up at the ceiling, talking. And how Baze had asked, again, always fearful, whether Chirrut would accept the offer the elders had made and become their seer. (It frightens him, the thought of this loss. Once the seer sinks, they never emerge according to the stories, they slip into the waters of the Force and exist there alone, like the koi in the temple pond, always submerged, only their messages passing to those left in the world. Baze can get along without Chirrut, but he does not want to. He has never wanted to, though this is a thing he does not say because it is base and selfish and would take Chirrut’s choices from him. They are free men. They are both free men within the bonds of the Whills, but that does not mean they would not bend if the other asked for something. It is a fine line to tread, and Baze is fearful of crossing it always because he would bend. For Chirrut. He would bend backward until he broke and never once complain. Without hesitation. Without regret. And yet he would not dare ask the same of Chirrut. Baze is the river, Chirrut is the wind. Only one of these things is meant to be contained in vessels.)

“Why not accept?” he’d asked, trying not to hold onto Chirrut’s hand too tightly, attempting to keep the grip loose enough that he could slip away whenever he needed to. I will not tie you down, Baze had thought, but I will remain here whenever you need me.

Chirrut shrugged and gripped a little tighter himself. “I like the universe here more than the Force, Baze. I like the way I can differentiate what section of the marketplace I’m in by the scent of the spices being sold. I like the way the sun warms my face even when the wind from the desert is bitter and cold. I like the feel of sand under my feet as we practice in the sparring yard.” 

Then he paused to turn his head and pressed a kiss to Baze’s bare shoulder, and the way his lips quirked could only mean that he was smirking. “I like running my tongue across your hip and listening to the way it makes your breathing stutter. I love the way you moan into kisses when I wrap my fingers in your hair. I adore how you kiss me completely as though I’m going to escape into the night at any moment. I live for the way you say my name when I’m inside of you. I love you, Baze Malbus.”

Every word a spike in Baze’s heart. Every word a binding even though he knew it shouldn’t be. “That’s not enough to stay.”

“It is. For me.” Chirrut sighed and turned onto his side so that Baze could feel the weight of his blind but not unseeing gaze. “The Force is many incredible, wonderful things, but it is all around us. I do not need to lose myself in it to find it.”

Keeping his voice steady was a strain, not allowing the emotion out for fear of it swaying Chirrut one way or another was difficult. “It may help the temple.”

“The Whills are not always the most important thing, Baze.”

“Blasphemy.” Each syllable laced with trepidation. I cannot be the one who keeps you from your destiny.

The lips pressed to his neck were a distractionary measure that Chirrut excelled at. “If the Force needs to tell me things, it can do so without me surrendering to it. I’m the best fighter the Whills has. It would be a shame for them to lose me.” When he canted his hips forward, Baze felt the press of his attention, hard, against his leg. 

“I thought I was the best fighter.” Each word was breathy, almost lost. Rivers cut through rocks, rain wears mountains down, but the wind can move water. 

“No, my love.” Chirrut’s words made him shudder. “You’re just the most devoted. To things that matter to you, which seems to be everything but yourself.” Another kiss, another insistent motion of his hips, and then Baze had turned to meet him such that the next words were almost lost in their kiss, but Baze heard them; they burned from the inside out. “That’s alright, though, I’m devoted to you.”

Baze continues to weave, his fingers lost in the motion even as his mind is lost in the memory. He has never needed much focus to work the loom, especially when he is not trying for a specific pattern. This is work to ease his mind not occupy it. 

“Why are you weaving now?” Chirrut asks, voice still a whine, still a sigh like someone ignored, and Baze remembers again, all their peers walking around and away from Chirrut, not looking at him, like he was a ghost, like he was not there at all. 

Except for Baze who, despite being two years ahead, despite the fact that he should have been nose deep in his work, catching up on the reading that he loved even though it was hard because the letters always seemed to move and wind away from him of their own accord, who was supposed to be training because his body wasn’t right, always did the wrong thing at the wrong time, had left his discpline behind to stride across the floor of the wide dorm room occupired by the younglings, and twined his fingers into Chirrut’s. “I see you,” he’d said. “I see you. You’re here. I hear you. You’re here.”

And Chirrut, blind except in the Force, had looked up at him, and Baze thought he felt Jedha itself move beneath their feet. “You’re overflowing.”

They were scary words, and Baze had nearly dropped his hand then and there but could not. He could not leave someone alone, lost, like he had been when he was very small. “What?”

“The Force.” Chirrut touched his face with a free hand, as easily as if he were not blind at all. “It’s everywhere in you.”

From that moment, they were friends. From that moment, they were woven as intricately, as fully as any of Baze’s pieces, though he tried to keep the ties loose enough to let Chirrut fly if he wanted, a freedom he has never taken.

“I can’t sleep,” Baze answers as he listens to Chirrut cross their room and settle down behind him. 

“I can think of better ways to relax,” Chirrut’s tone has already shifted, flowing from sulky to seductive, pitched right on the edge of bedroom quality but not quite as silver and sumptuous as it can be in the middle of their trysts. His fingers comb through Baze’s hair as easily as if he could see it, his motions precise and fine, honed by years of practice. As Baze separates his threads, Chirrut separates his hair into sections. 

It is a struggle to focus on anything but the way Chirrut braids, how deft his fingers are as they work quickly and with just the right amount of pressure to make Baze’s stomach flip and his toes curl. “You’re not normally jealous of my weaving.”

Chirrut hums behind him and pulls slightly harder, enough to coax a small moan from Baze’s lips even as his fingers falter on the loom. “You’re Force weaving.” It sounds like an accusation.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Chirrut. I’m just working on simple textiles for the kitchens or for sale.”

One of Chirrut’s long, perfect fingers digs through his hair to poke at Baze’s scalp, and Baze thinks about how large Chirrut’s hands are, how many ways they know to kill someone, and yet how gentle they have always been with him. “No, you keep reaching into the past and pulling the threads back and then letting them go. Like you’re loosening something.”

It is hard to hide things from Chirrut who has lived always with one foot in the stream. Baze might be close, but he is on the bank, throwing stones or dipping his fingers in when he gets brave. He has always been too far to really know. He’s not sure what to say, what he is being accused of, if anything, so he responds in the only way he knows how to in moments like these when he is out of his depth. “I’m sorry.”

Chirrut’s teeth against his neck are even more distracting than the hands in his hair, but the words hissed into his ear are the ones that threaten to undo him. “Hold as tight as you want, Baze. I’m not going away. Weave me further into your life. Tangle all our strands together like our limbs when I’m inside you.” 

This man is a nuisance. This man is a chimerical, otherworldly creature that their peers avoided when they were children because they were frightened, and they were working on an instinct of self-preservation. Baze, as Chirrut once pointed out angrily after he had gotten himself injured getting between a huddled group of orphans and a charging sand beast in the desert, lacks this instinct. Chirrut had railed at him then, one enraged word after another until Baze had taken his hand, until Baze had pulled him close, and Chirrut had broken into tears because Baze was a foolish man devoted to everything that existed outside of himself. “Think of yourself for once, fool,” Chirrut had said between sobs.

Baze hadn’t the heart to inform him that he was unequipped for such decisions. 

“I can’t weave the Force, Chirrut, even if you want me to.”

“Liar.” Chirrut’s words are thick, dripping sugar syrup right into his ear as he licks along the shell, and Baze shudders, one hand reached back to touch whatever skin he can reach. “You are Baze Malbus. You can do anything.”

Baze laughs until Chirrut moves, sliding into his lap, cock hard and pressing again him, which turns the laughter into a moan even as Baze loops his arm around his waist to pull him closer. “You think too highly of me, Chirrut.”

“I am the most devoted to you, remember?”

Blasphemy, Baze’s mind hisses, but he cannot get the words out when Chirrut’s tongue is in his mouth, when Chirrut is gasping into the kiss and grinding on his lap and pulling on their clothes like the universe will end if their bare skin is not touching. Baze is quick to assist him, swept up in this seemingly frantic ebb of need. 

Chirrut continues to talk because he rarely shuts up, and Baze would have it no other way. “If you won’t weave us together, I might have to do it. But my weaving has never been as good so don’t complain when it’s ugly.” 

“Force,” Baze moans, almost a curse, when Chirrut kisses his neck again, teeth insistent and just on the right edge of painful. “What are you doing, Chirrut?”

“You, presently,” is the only answer given, the only answer needed, and Baze laughs again, keeps laughing until Chirrut’s fingers are wrapping around his cock, and then it stutters out into a low, throaty moan of need as his eyes close.

In the dark behind his eyelids, he can see it. He can see it all because the Force is everywhere, and it is strings, and it is webs, and it is rivers. He can see it. And they are a knot, ever tightening. There is no escape; Baze does not want one.


	21. Devotion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Slightly NSFW.

Sometimes it is difficult to love a man whose devotion seems to be to the Force first, to everyone and everything else second, and to himself last of all. It can be hard to watch him punish himself for all the things that are not his fault, that cannot be his fault; things that could never even come near the realm of his own fault, which Chirrut believes even though Baze will not, seemingly cannot, holds his hands over his massive ears and prays until Chirrut stops talking, until Chirrut presses his lips, tight, into a line and just stares at him, glares at him until Baze leaves their room.

The world is crumbling around them, and Chirrut understands the inclination to hold tight to the Force, to thread it around your hands for comfort, but he cannot understand the lengths that Baze takes it sometimes, the way he seems to crush everything bad in their world into bits of coal that he can swallow, one after another, until everything evil exists in his belly, unable to harm anyone else, engulfed by the breadth and depth of his soul, held in the ocean inside of his form, neutralized by his very existence. Baze is almost too good to exist, shines like a star, glows like a beacon such that the needy are always able to seek him out, find him, wring him dry with their wants.

Baze cannot turn anyone away. Baze has never turned anyone away in his life. Baze who will work at a task until it is done even if his hands are bleeding, even if his knuckles and knees are bruised, even if he passes out from dehydration at Chirrut’s feet.

And Chirrut loves him. Even when it seems like Baze loves nothing more than martyrdom, and the Force. Chirrut loves him. What else is there for him to do?

He feeds selfishness back into Baze’s body with his own mouth. The curl of his tongue against Baze’s cock is a reminder of the physical realm, the world outside of meditating and waiting for the Force all day. His fingers pressing into Baze’s body are there to ensure that he does not forget there is a world here, a life to lead, fucking to attend to. (Baze never uses that word. Never. Not once. All of his words are poetry when they come, which is seldom because he is quiet. Solemn. He has always been this way. Was this way with his hair in a top knot, and his eyes on the ground, good, obedient. It was Chirrut shaking the branches of the trees and smashing through the wall screens and yelling at the top of his lungs in the kyber caves for the Force to listen. This last thing he does still, only he is no longer asking for it to find him, he is asking for it to fuck off and leave his lover alone before it devours him completely inside and out.)

Baze believes in the Force enough that when it fails him, one day, one day Chirrut is sure is coming sooner rather than later, that Chirrut worries it will wash him away. It will knock over some wall built in his soul, and then all the poison he has been swallowing will eat him alive from the inside out. If they are lucky, he will only die. If they are cursed, Baze will be the harbinger of the doom he sees on the horizon, a self-fulfilling prophecy, a monster.

If they are cursed, Chirrut will have to end his life, set him free.

Life is not fair. 

Life is not fair, and that is the end of it, and that is fine. Chirrut can live with this fact as he has lived with so many facts throughout his life. The fact that the Force will not speak with him because it knows his anger as well as his faith. The fact that it floods, too much, too bright, through the veins of a man strong enough to carry it but always looking for more burdens, seeking absolution from something, for some wrong that Chirrut knows has never been committed. Unless it is the future, which they are both unable to see.

The Force is twisty and tangled and woven, like fighting out the knots in the balls of yarn that Baze brings home from the market, the ones that Chirrut spends all night trying to set to rights even with his waning eyesight, even with the fire in his chest, even with the fact that he will have to pry Baze out of his praying, first with words and then with caresses, kisses, his cock. 

It’s difficult loving a man who loves the Force, who is devoted to it in a way that knows that no bounds because the man himself never learned how to draw boundaries. It is all of nothing with Baze Malbus. He is an open door, he is a window flung wide, he is a pitcher in the rain, overflowing. 

Only Chirrut has keys. Only Chirrut has a sash. Only Chirrut pours the water out.

Someone else might walk away, but Chirrut knows the way that Baze’s eyes look when they fall on him, when they see him, after the Force has been wiped away, and it is like being looked at by the heart of a star, it is like swallowing kyber, feeling it twist and spark all the way down through your body, it is like falling forever and never landing. Baze speaks in poetry, kisses like the world is ending every single time, presses fingers and his tongue to places that can make Chirrut keen and cry and forget. Forget that storm on the horizon, forget his dwindling vision, forget the fact that Force passed him over, passed him up even though he stood in the cave and yelled at it, hands open wide.

He was ready, and he was willing, and he was strong. And he would have stood at the door and screamed at it anytime it tried to take advantage of him, of his love, of his heart.

Chirrut was too much for it, all locked rooms and winding corridors and boxes to trap it in. Chirrut raised by pickpockets and swindlers and thieves, taught to have a charming tongue and swift hands from a young age, raised to let nothing and no one in too deep, to take before you are taken from.

He looks at Baze, sleeping, murmuring, his brow creased, his hair a tangled mess, and knows that he failed. He let someone in too deep. He let someone in all the way to the heart of him, swallowed him down the way that Baze swallows down everything. 

Sometimes, he cries at night, bitter, furious tears, because how did he get here? He cries, and Baze stirs from a slumber that is never deep enough, always waiting for the call of the Force or the cries of the poor, constantly tired, never at peace. Baze hears him, and rises, and tucks him into the span of his arms, which contains a universe in and of itself, and he holds him so close that Chirrut feels his Force, the Force of Baze, and that is better than anything he thought he wanted, that Force he takes in all the way, that Force he never fights. 

It is difficult to love a man who is devoted to the Force, but Chirrut is devoted to the Force he can feel in others, and in Baze most of all. And he is devoted to ensuring that it is never twisted into something that it should not be. So he stays and he argues. When none of that works, he draws fingers over skin until the only thing that either of them can feel, the one universe they exist in is each other.


	22. Worth the Universe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone Lives No One Dies AU at the end of R1. Baze is here but not because healing. Chirrut and Jyn bond.

“What would you have done, if he died?” Jyn asks, and her voice is a flat line, though Chirrut is not sure whether that is from exhaustion of just because she cannot determine what emotion goes with those words and has decided to simply leave all of them in their boxes where it is easier. There’s this strange thing about Jyn that he has not had time to acknowledge quite yet, the way in which she is so startlingly similar to Baze and to himself as well, how it shows up in unexpected flashes, how he hopes to be able to get to know it better, to get to know her better now that they might have the time for it.

Chirrut knows where she is by the sound of her voice as well as all the little currents she makes in the air around her as much as the Force. She is constantly moving, like she can’t be still, like she always needs to be ready to flee at a moment’s notice even though her injured leg will probably always pain her a little now. It is Jyn, though, and Jyn will survive. Like he has, like Baze has even though his husband still floats in bacta, being put back together bit by bit, slowly. Baze sleeps but not does fall far from the Force, Chirrut would know it if he did. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Baze laughs and huffs and calls him a fool, which means I love you, which means I will not go. Chirrut should know. Not just because he knows Baze inside and out but also because it is what he means when he calls the other a fool as well.The thing he does not think on, because it hurts, is the way that Baze pleaded, “Do not go,” as though he thought he might. Baze has always been softer at the heart, less sure of devotion, always ready for abandonment.

“I don’t know,” Chirrut says, and he means it. Next to him, the air shifts, and he knows that his answer startles Jyn. When he smiles, it is mostly to calm her. Jyn needs calming the way that Baze needs calming with smiles and laughter and care and strong arms with enough pressure, but Chirrut does not reach to embrace her because he doesn’t think she is at the point where she can accept that yet, not from him, though maybe from Baze who is better at giving those things away. One heart bleeding knows another heart bleeding. Chirrut has simply learned to smell the iron in the air. 

“We have been together forever. I would not know myself without him,” Chirrut says, trying to clarify the feeling in his chest, trying to put it into words that mean the same in Basic as the words Baze has whispered to him in Jedhan each night, every night since the first night they kissed, and the world actually started for him.

Her breath comes out in a long huff that sounds agitated, and Chirrut can hear her cross her arms over her chest, shift from foot to foot, hissing in slight pain but doing it anyway. Like someone else he knows. “That sounds idiotic,” are the words she says, but they are not the words she means. That sounds terrifying, she means.

Chirrut nods. “It can be.” It can be both. “But it’s worth it. He’s worth it. He has always been.” In his mind, the dark corner that flickers and flashes, the light that has wavered but never gone out because Chirrut will cup his hands around it and die before it does, Baze snorts, and Chirrut can feel him roll his eyes. His next words, of course, are for both of them. “He’d never believe it, but it’s true. He’s worth the universe.”

Jyn’s next words are so full of honesty, of confusion that Chirrut turns and holds a hand out, trying to see if she will accept it and the consolation he wants to impart with it. “I don’t understand.”

His fingers twitch in the air for lonely seconds before she takes them, and he twines them together and squeezes tight, the way he has done with countless children and believers on the streets of NiJedha to comfort them when times were bad, the way he has done with Baze when the man cannot stand any longer. “I know. None of us do. Not really. We’re all just flailing in the dark for purchase. It’s important to have someone to hold onto.”

“Is that what you are for him?” Jyn sounds analytical, someone trying to put something together that she has only recently seen, and Chirrut wishes things had been easier in life for her, though that is a gift he cannot give.

Sometimes Chirrut will answer for both of them, has to because Baze so often answers in ways that people who have not spent a lifetime at his side do not know how to process. This time, though, Chirrut answers for himself only. “No, that it what he is for me.” In the darkness of his mind, he feels Baze smile, and he knows that one, he remembers it from when they were young and he was sighted, the smile that could fill a room, the smile that could steal a breath, the smile only for him. 

“Oh,” Jyn huffs out and her fingers tighten and release in his hand so he loosens his grip in case she feels trapped, but Jyn does not go anywhere, just sits, tightening and releasing methodically and Chirrut lets her while they wait, the both of them grateful for something to hold onto.


	23. Colors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> NSFWish

There is a space between heartbeats when the only thing that exists in the universe is each other. It lasts for such a short time that he imagines other people would wonder why he ever thinks of it at all, but it is a gift, it is a reprieve, it is somewhere that Baze Malbus can rest. There is a space between heartbeats when there is no temple, no Whills, no Force, no Empire. Nothing is going poorly, no one is starving, no one has died. The fires are out, the walls still stand, the moon is secure. The moon is poor, the moon has always been poor, but it is secure. The kyber sings everywhere instead of just in the staff in Chirrut’s hands, and the tiny piece embedded in Baze’s thigh, a surgery he underwent so that Chirrut could always locate him after the sickness took his sight. It aches and pains Baze, wakes him, reminds him of everything and everyone thrown away by the Force, for the Force, because of the Force, under the Force’s watchful gaze without it interfering once.

Faith is a thing he always turned to for comfort, but all it does for him now is burn from the inside out, all it does is define him through negative space, where it used to be versus where it is currently. And it aches when the wind blows. And it sings when Chirrut’s fingers skate over his skin. And it throbs when he cries. It knows him. Baze knows it. They spoke to each other in the dark of the kyber cave, drawn to each other, neither of them making a choice, just knowing.

Chirrut says it turns him blue like veins nestled under skin, like the ceremonial garb used for certain temple ceremonies long gone. (Like the blue that Chirrut’s eyes have become, Baze thinks but never says. Chirrut cants his head like he knows already, every time.) There are many things that Chirrut says, small fancies and favors that he bestows with words, and only some of them hurt because they are too true or because Baze wishes they were true but cannot seem to figure out the path that will wind him back to there from where he stands now, with his gun, with his bad knees, with the twinging, painful shard of kyber that he swears he can feel dig deeper into his muscle, into his bone, into his soul every time he moves. It’s worth it. It’s worth it for Chirrut to be able to find him, always. Anything is worth that.

(Neither of them mentions the question that has hung heavy in Baze’s mind like thick curtains to block out the sun, whether it is safe to store kyber in the body, whether it will poison him, little by little. Baze has never been afraid of death. Baze has only ever been afraid of surviving, alone. If the kyber takes him first, before the war, before the Empire, before some scared mark or lucky thief just trying to get by, maybe it will at least be peaceful, just a wasting, just a failing, little by little, just a giving up. Baze can give up; he has given things up before. The trick, as always, will be convincing Chirrut to do the same. Chirrut who has never backed down. If–when–Baze goes first, he thinks that at least Chirrut will be able to find him, in the waters of the Force, assuming that they allow him back in after he has attempted to fill them with concrete and rubbish.)

Life is hard, and life is blue, worn down to the faded, flickering light of a single torch in a small room that they rent with the credits they scrap together. Even if Chirrut chides him for his gift of reduction, claims that Jedha is certainly not just blue, has never been just blue. Chirrut will make him recite the colors that exist outside of their window, which lets in all the wind, all the cold, just to make sure that Jedha has not become as blue as Baze’s talk makes it seem, as the shard of kyber in his leg makes him appear. 

Of course, there is color in Jedha; all the colors live there, just like all people live there, a motley collection of races and cultures, endless twining streets of warm reds and tans and cream, trailing red banners in the sky, green silks fanning across the tables of stands, yellow stars on fabric, yellow spices on a table. Rose gold skin in the light of that single lamp, rose gold skin stretched over perfectly honed muscles, rose gold skin lined with paler scars, some jagged, some cleanly done, flesh that shivers under his touch, startles with gooseflesh when he uncovers it and the wind hits before his tongue can. 

Chirrut will chide him for his solitary choice of colors to immortalize, but Baze is not deterred. If all he ever sees is the blue of his sorrow, and the rose gold of Chirrut’s skin mapped under his wandering fingers, it will be enough of a spectrum for him. Never enough for Chirrut, though, so he will always recount the other colors even if they feel like ghosts as they pass from his tongue to Chirrut’s ear. The scream of red silk around Chirrut’s waist, the one tree in the temple garden, still lush and green, straining toward the sky that he can see from their perch, the stall of orange spices bright under the sun. He speaks about all of them from the ordinary to the banal, Chirrut’s lips pressed against his ear demanding descriptions of Baze’s skin, of how Baze’s skin looks flushed, or bruised, or in repose, passion, acres of Jedhan red bracketed by mountains of rose gold.

(Chirrut once came more from Baze’s detailing of his fingers wrapped around Chirrut’s dick than from the ministrations of that hand. At least that is the way that Chirrut tells it, but Chirrut is a con artist so Baze puts no stock in this tale, knows the lengths that Chirrut will go to in order to win a smile. He’d rather let Chirrut win in this than correct him, rather let him have the smile than let himself have the truth; it has always been this way.)

Baze’s life is blue, narrowed down, trapped by the beat of the kyber in his leg which wars with the natural rhythm of his heart to the point where, sometimes, he cannot sleep for all the rushing in his head. It is then that Chirrut will clamber onto him, perfect pressure against his body, a hold like iron, a will stronger even than that, and rest his head on his chest and breathe. They slow Baze’s heart down together, they sing the kyber to sleep, they find the space that exists between heartbeats, stretch it out, live there. In that space, Chirrut laughs, sees, sings. In that space, Baze smiles and brightens and is all colors again.


	24. Often, Always

They bandage each other’s hands; it’s one of the first acts of intimacy they know, sitting across from each other, arms held out, watching the bits of gauze wind around cuts and scrapes and bruises.

Learn to mend what you damage, the masters say, push them together to sort out their sparring and harsh words, glares meeting across the span of a room. You got off on the wrong foot, try again, the masters say as they set them to tasks, one after another, trying to help them quell the strange, thick sense of competition.

They bandage each other’s hands.

“I will be the best guardian in the temple,” one says while the other eyes him, holds his fingers. And they know, the both of them know, the amount of power stored and inherent in the other, the fierce words, the knowledge. They know; it’s in them too.

They continue to bandage each other’s wounds, but slowly something changes.

“I will be the best guardian in the temple,” the other says and hands once cradled for tending have become something else, fingers tangled for comfort at the end of a long day, lips brushed over those knuckles cracked and sore.

They fight each other less, though they touch more.

The other only hums. They’ve had this conversation before; they’ll have it again, often, always.

They bind each other’s hands, a scarlet sash red as fresh spilled blood, a declaration of their commitment to each other, their love. They watch as the bit of silk is woven through fingers, over the backs of scarred hands, around their wrists, as if it is an extension of their hearts breaking free from their pulse points.

Later, at night, naked limbs tangled like that sash, one whispers, “You’re the best guardian in the temple.”

“No,” says the other, turns to press a trace of a kiss across well-known lips, “you are.”

They let the words dissolve into more kisses, fleeting touches that turn frantic, grasping, wanting. They come together for that is their bond now and there is no need for more words.

After all, they’ve had that conversation before; they’ll have it again, often, always.

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to come find me on [Tumblr](http://sarkastically.tumblr.com/)


End file.
